Tomorrow I co-host (is that the right word?) a seminar in UCD about academic blogging. At the moment I’m thinking about the uses of blogging, and the question that animates me at the moment is this one: if a new PhD student was to go to my blog and scan through the posts over the last three or four years, would he or she learn anything about what it’s like to be a PhD student?
Is there a difference between an academic blog and a blog written by someone who happens to be an academic, whether a research student or a lecturer, or whatever?
One of the points I’ll be stressing tomorrow is that blogging complements and even improves your ability to write and research a PhD; that it establishes informal networks outside of your home university which sustain you and your research in ways that your own university and department often can’t. And that it’s also a place where you can write about whatever you feel, outside the constraints of academic discourse.
I’m not sure how any of this applies to this blog, and that’s why I’ve been combing my old posts, trying to see how much I’ve written about the experience of being a PhD researcher. Quite a bit, as it happens. But the posts on academic-related issues are distributed amongst all sorts of other things. So this is probably a blog written by someone who happens to be a research student, rather than an academic blog.
Stephen
October 13, 2009 at 10:18 pm
I think the answer is a rather obvious ‘it depends’
I think (correct me if I’m wrong) that this blog is mostly targeted at your ‘friends’ – I know that you write elsewhere on the internet and these writings may be more useful to someone who wants to gain an insight into your academic positions?
I visit here because it contains ‘stuff Karl found interesting’, and that is generally also stuff I find interesting.
Academics like PZ Myers use their blogs as a platform for their personal positions – There’s some biology in there but it’s hardly the main focus.
Other Bloggers really focus on their work – Blogging has come a long way in the few years since you wrote your blog’s tagline.
karl.whitney
October 15, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Cheers Stephen,
Yep – I think you’re right. In the end I did divide academic blogging into two types – blogs written about an academic topic, that stick closely to the subject, and blogs that happen to be written by someone who’s an academic/researcher, and in some ways reflect academic concerns, but also seek out all sorts of other things, and occasionally just act as a kind of online diary.
Hope you’re well.