Academic Blogs. This is a preprint of a paper accepted, March 2005, for publication in Reference Librarian. (forthcoming).

Transcription

1 Academic Blogs This is a preprint of a paper accepted, March 2005, for publication in Reference Librarian (forthcoming).

2 Academic Blogs 2 of 20 Academic Blogs By Anita Coleman 1 Assistant Professor School of Information Resources & Library Science 1515 E. First St. University of Arizona Tucson, AZ Phone: + 1 (520) Fax: +1 (520) asc@u.arizona.edu Abstract This article provides an overview of academic blogs in general and introduces, ASC Online, an advising and mentoring blog for graduate students in LIS at the University of Arizona. Other types of academic blogs are highlighted along with brief information about blog directories, search engines, and rankings. 1 Anita Sundaram Coleman, B.A., M.L.I.S., M.S., Ph. D. is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Resources and Library Science, University of Arizona, Tucson. Mailing address: 1515 E. First St., Tucson, AZ address: asc@u.arizona.edu. The participation of SIRLS students, , in my virtual community building, and subsequent blogging activities is gratefully acknowledged. 2

3 Academic Blogs 3 of 20 Background In the summer of 2002 (June) I started a blog, ASC Online, for my graduate students at the School of Information Resources & Library Science (SIRLS), University of Arizona, Tucson. ASC Online started as and continues to be a weblog of Information Science & Technology education for LIS graduates. (Coleman 2004) I announced the blog to my students and colleagues and waited expectantly for comments. Why did I begin to blog? Why was it an advising blog? Why was it a blog and not a listserv or wiki? What exactly does mentoring in Information Science and Technology include? I will try to answer these questions and more through a brief overview of the phenomenon of academic blogging. But first, the personal story behind ASC Online (see Fig. 1 for a screenshot of ASC Online). My students and I are not strangers to online communication and collaborative tools. The school has a strong online program and about a decade ago was a pioneer of online Library and Information Science (LIS) education in the United States. Earlier the same year, 2002, we had experimented with virtual community building using software such as slashdot (2005), use mod wiki (2005), and mkdoc (2005), a content management software. I decided to blog because all these software tools had proved unsatisfactory for our purposes. I wanted to engender a sense of community and model scholarship behaviors. To novices students, feature-rich technologies such as slashdot and mkdoc appeared to be a barrier to creating and sustaining an online presence. The usemod wiki, which has very limited functionality was the most popular but even 3

4 Academic Blogs 4 of 20 here, many students did not participate actively in public discussion. They preferred to make one line comments. Thus, a blog, where one (or a few writers take responsibility for leading the writing) seemed a good starting point for advanced online community building activity. It s also one that fitted especially well for advising our remote and oncampus students who found it difficult to campus during conventional business hours. On my blog, I speak about a wide variety of subjects in Information Science and Technology (IS&T) and role-model as much as I can online. My student read regularly, reflect in solitude, and occasionally share comments publicly and more often send private s. During winter 2005 ASC Online was briefly suspended and a survey conducted to see, what effects if any, the lack of a weekly blog had on my advisees. Fig. 1: Screenshot of ASC Online 4

5 Academic Blogs 5 of 20 A Short History of Academic Blogs: In 2002 there were very few blogs that were written by scholars. But one year later scholar blogs made the news: Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio? asked David Glenn, in a Research and Publishing column of The Chronicle of Higher Education (Glenn 2003). Glenn described blogs by scholars and tried to determine the reasons scholars write web logs or blogs. An accompanying live online discussion featured scholar blogger Ed Voloknov who pointed out that blogging will eventually come to be valued the way that op-eds or media appearances are valued -- at my institution, we'd call it part of the person's service to the community, rather than part of the person's scholarship. Voloknov went on to note that blogging is also a mechanism for scholars to promote their scholarship to a broader audience, both scholarly and nonscholarly. So even if scholars won't get faculty credit for blogging as such, they'll get more satisfaction because their ideas are being more widely spread -- and they may eventually get a better academic reputation as a result, precisely because more people will be noticing their ideas. Glenn s article highlighted nine academic blogs, two directories that maintain lists of academic bloggers, and made it clear that blogging had come to the attention of scholars. Despite the uses of blogging by scholars, I have been unable to find the systematic use of blogs for academic advising and these continue to be relatively infrequent as quick perusal of Rhetorica shows. 5

6 Academic Blogs 6 of 20 Rhetorica: Professors who blog is a list of blogs run by professors and a screenshot of it can be seen in Fig. 2 below. The list of blogs on it reveal a surprising diversity. There is FOS News (Suber, 2005) which is Free Online Scholarship News written by Peter Suber. FOS News is now known as Open Access news and Suber reports on the open access movement in detail besides providing overviews and definitions of open access. Since open access and the development of an intellectual commons are integral to library and information science, I sometimes quote from FOS News in ASC Online. Fig. 2: Screenshot of Rhetorica, Professors Who Blog 6

7 Academic Blogs 7 of 20 In 2004, the University of Minnesota made blogging news when they announced UThink (2004). With that catchy name, UThink, blogs were made available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. UThink s goal was to support teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and individual expression for the U of M community. The capability for students to blog was now as easily available (and almost routinely assigned) as an account! Fig. 3: UTHINK, blogging as a tool for student learning Types of Academic Blogs 7

8 Academic Blogs 8 of 20 The brief discussion above makes it clear that there are many types of academic weblogs. What are the major characteristics that define an academic blog? Besides being a log that is published to the web (Grumet, 2003), I find that an academic blog also has the following characteristics: 1) access: it is openly and freely accessible 2) audience: it is written for professors and students, and/or practitioners 3) asynchronous interactivity: it has a comment or other discussion link mechanism whereby readers can post their comments publicly 4) archive: posts and comments are both archived and threaded (linked) 5) core content: the topics discussed are intellectual, academic, and imbued with a certain essence, a core (in other words, there is always an educational or informational goal to the post but it is usually focused on a core value, belief or set of intellectual concepts) 6) currency: the blog is updated weekly if not more frequently 7) timeliness: is responsive to relevant global news and makes connections 8) accuracy: the blog posts are accurate 9) authority: the blogger has authority in a clearly defined area 10) community: there is a community of readers, and less frequently, writers There are many types of academic blogs and I have selected three categories for further discussion below as I think these are the most important for the continuing education of library and information professionals. The three types are: 1) Information 8

9 Academic Blogs 9 of 20 Disseminators and News Aggregators, 2) Revealing Invisible Colleges, and 3) Teaching Tools for E-Advising/E-mentoring, and E-Portfolios. 9

10 Academic Blogs 10 of 20 Weblogs as Information Disseminators and News Aggregators: EduResources Weblog focuses on locating, evaluating, discussing, and providing guidelines to instructional resources for faculty in higher education. It is an example of an information dissemination service, a web clearinghouse, or news aggregator that is a blog. Fig. 4: Cogdogblog, an information disseminator for instructional technologists Cogdogblog is Alan Levine's fenced-in area to bark about instructional technology projects at the Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (mcli), at the Maricopa 10

11 Academic Blogs 11 of 20 Community Colleges, Arizona. It can also be considered a news aggregator as Levine tries to bring together all potential news of interest in the area of instructional technology. An example of a weblog that is sponsored or maintained by a professional society that is not involved with traditional or mainstream K-12 and higher education is Learning Circuits. Learning Circuits hosts the blog of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), the largest association of workplace learning and performance professionals. E-learning gurus in ASTD post to Learning Circuits when the mood strikes them; the log entry and articles they share are research-based and provocative. Fig. 5: Learning Circuits, a News Aggregator for ASTD 11

12 Academic Blogs 12 of 20 Weblogs Reveal the Invisible Colleges of Scholarly Communication Fig. 6: Instapundit.com Instapundit was one of the top ranked blogs (as per Blog street) in It is run by law professor Glen Reynolds and his blog clearly meets one of the criteria to become a top blogger: frequency. Reynolds posts frequently, as many as five posts in an hour sometimes! 12

13 Academic Blogs 13 of 20 Group blogging has caught on in academia. Crooked Timber notes the qualifications necessary for the academic link policy and lists the scholar blogs for various disciplines. LISNews, a blog for the field of LIS is also a collaborative weblog. Fig. 7: Crooked Timber 13

14 Academic Blogs 14 of 20 Fig. 8: LISNews.com 14

15 Academic Blogs 15 of 20 Weblogs as Teaching Tools: E-portfolios Weblogs are emerging as key tools for electronic portfolio (e-portfolio) development and sharing. E-portfolios can be defined as personalized web-based collections of work, response to work and reflections that are used to demonstrate key skills and accomplishments for a variety of contexts and time periods. (2004) and there are many blogs about E-portfolios. Michelle s Online Learning Freakout Party Zone has a comprehensive section on Electronic Portfolios. Fig. 9: E-Portfolio Blogs 15

16 Academic Blogs 16 of 20 The LIS Learning Showcase is another blog I run wherein student projects in LIS courses with me at the University of Arizona, School of Library and Information Science, are made available. Fig. 10: LIS Learning Showcase 16

17 Academic Blogs 17 of 20 Blog Directories, Search Engines and Blog Rankings: The Unesco Libraries Portals provides a link to 57 weblogs in Library and Information Science. Fig. 11: UNESCO Libraries Portal BlogSearchEngine is a search engine for blogs and moblogs (blog pictures). 17

18 Academic Blogs 18 of 20 Fig. 12: Blog Search Engine Blogs are ranked by BlogStreet Rankings (which also has a search engine and directory of blogs). At BlogStreet, follow th eliknk on Blog Profile to see a blog s visual neighbourhood, it s goolatives, and blogback. Follow the BlogTops link to see the most popular blogs, the most influential and so on. 18

19 Academic Blogs 19 of 20 Fig. 13: Blog Street Rankings Conclusion: There are 116,004 blogs today and only about half of them have RSS feeds enabled. Not all of them are academic although a great many are and I hope this article has helped you understand academic blogs much better than before. One final statistic: Perseus Development which surveyed blogs found that 80.9 % of active blogs rarely link to traditional news services (Perseus, 2004) a revolution is underway let s make sure libraries are a part of it! 19

20 Academic Blogs 20 of 20 References American Society for Training and Development. URL: Last retrieved 25 March Biddlecombe, Erin, Michael Lamberson, Marianne Schroeder, Sigal Stein. E-porfolios: an emerging community of practice. URL: Last retrieved 25 March Cogdogblog. [cdb] Alan s weekly, wacky web II: Projects, ideas, and instructional technology (huh?). URL: Last retrieved 25 March Coleman, Anita. (2004) ASC Online. URL: Last retrieved 25 March Crooked Timber. Last retrieved 25 March elearnspace. Everything elearning: Blogs. URL: Last retrieved 25 March

21 Academic Blogs 21 of 20 Glenn, David. Scholars who blog. The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6, URL: Last retrieved 25 March Grumet, Andrew. Deep thinking about weblogs. URL: Last retrieved 25 March Learning Circuits. URL: Last retrieved 25 March LIS Learning Showcase. URL: Last retrieved 25 March Perseus White Papers. (2004). The Blogging Iceberg Of 4.12 million hosted weblogs, most little seen, quickly abandoned. URL: Last retrieved 25 March Maricopa Center for Instruction and Learning. URL: Last retrieved 25 March Michelle s Online Learning Party Freakout Zone: E-Portfolios. Last retrieved 25 March

22 Academic Blogs 22 of 20 UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries. URL: Last retrieved 25 March