I have had a few attempts at running a blog “for work” and each time I have hit a bit of a brick wall. There has been a lot written recently on blogging, what it is about, and whether it has an important role in a formal teaching-and-learning context. I have been stimulated to update this blog via a web-forum email asking about blogging at UniMelb …
My current thoughts re blogging as a genre of writing:
1. Blogging software provides an easy information architecture for “episodic writing” … especially of things that are loosely topic based, but become “topical” at a particular time for reasons that are not easily encapsulated, and are likely to be relevant again at a later date
2. Blogging tools are only useful for people who write prolifically, have regular access to the internet, do most of their writing at a computer rather than in a notebook and are comfortable with public scrutiny of their writing.
3. Blogging is essentially personal even when it’s work-related. I write to a blog as a convenient place to store ideas that are forming so that I can edit them from anywhere and I can refer to them easily if the ideas come up in conversation. I write to a publically-accessible blog to challenge myself to write more coherently than I would in a notebook – I operate from the premise that articulating an idea clearly is part of the process of thinking clearly, and that if I can’t express what I mean then I don’t actually know what I’m talking about yet. Feedback is always good when clarifying ideas.
4. Blogging has inherent dangers in the workplace – point 3 identifies that I am blogging ideas that are not necessarily fully formed. So a blog entry is a bit like a draft of an idea, or a “Dear Diary” type letter. There is a reason for drafting things and often it is because partially formed ideas that escape before their possible endpoints have been fully thought through can be dangerous. So I censor much of what I write to a blog. And because I do this, my blog ends up with very few entries and those that are written are not particularly interesting.
5. Blogging as a writing genre relies on students having a desire to write. Use of blogging software has some merit in a range of situations irrespective of whether the genre of writing is “true blogging ” (according to the blogging gurus in favour in any particular week …) My take on this is the most academics I have worked with are only just getting comfortable with discussion forums, and that blogging and RSS is beyond their comfort zone to use and support.
Re blogging software:
1. My first impediment to work-related blogging was lack of infrastructure and lack of server to install blogging software.
2. I tried using Bloki (http://www.bloki.com) for a while and it’s a pretty nice combination of blogs, forums and wiki-like website. I specifically used it to store information about web resources I happened to come across with annotations about what they were and why they looked interesting. My idea was that people with similar research interests would be able to follow what I was looking at on my blog, and might be inspired to make a similar resource available of their own reading so that we could share our research lives more effectively … I ended up becoming a bit wary about committing too much work-related stuff to a random server in a random location over which I have no control. I have to say, the site is still there 2 years later and there has been nothing but good service from the site.
3. I then installed MoveableType, PhpWiki and Moodle on my own personal website (http://wisebytes.net/research/blog/) to try them out and because it was the only place I had access to a shell account on a *nix server along with scritping and database services. I set up a research blog to take over from the Bloki site, but never managed to move my Bloki material to MoveableType. I used the PhpWiki quite a bit and liked it although I’ve never been game enough to leave it open to the world, and I never got around to publishing a read-only version of it either.
4. I finally got access to a server at UniMelb and installed blogging and wiki software. I used WordPress rather than MoveableType because it was just at the time where MoveableType introduced a licence fee which I didn’t want to pay. So I was again in a position of moving all my stuff from Bloki to MoveableType to WordPress. I also had great trouble with the authentication module in PhpWiki so that pages kept locking people out of editing them. I got Moodle working which good, and spent a bit of time playing with that too.
5. Having failed to inspire my academic colleagues to have any interest in starting a blog or using a wiki for drafting research papers or documentation and having spent a lot of time trying to get the infrastructure sorted to support wider spread usage of blogs, I actually ended up losing interest in writing blog content since most of it relates to a) things that none of my colleagues seem to find particularly interesting or b) things that are politically sensitive.
6. I have used BlogLines (http://www.bloglines.com/) as an RSS aggregator until I got swamped by the amount of stuff out in the world. I have ended up taking the lazy option of subscribing to Stephen Downes’ OnLineDaily newsletter as my primary source of keeping up with the world of edublogs. RSS has huge potential in teaching and learning but I’m waiting for other people to sort out the tools etc.
The biggest disincentive to maintaining a work-blog is a subtle shift in academic culture such that I am no longer confident that the university supports freedom of expression over corporate image, or substance over process, or content over style.
The biggest disincentive to supporting blogs in teaching and learning is an apparent lack of in-built passion for writing. Maybe moblogs or vlogs or Flickr will take off instead !!!