First of all, what constitutes an academic blog? What is the difference between a regular blog and an academic one? I myself didn't know, so I searched online for to find out some information. Academic blogs are "weblogs written by professors that will help you to learn about what life is like as a professor both inside and outside of the classroom" according to about.com. Shawn Moore, from hastac.orc seems to think that "academic blogs tend to be rather static and traditional posts that disseminate information rather than encourage participation and engagement". According to Brad DeLong on Wikipedia.com, the academic blogosphere is "a kind of invisible college".
Since I couldn't get one concrete definition of the academic blog, I looked up websites that are known as academic blogs and decided to evaluate them to create my own understanding of the academic blogosphere.
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/ is an academic blog about observations on film art. Personally, I would consider this as an academic blog because the readers learn something about the business of film. The author does not just share his opinions on movies and what he likes and dislikes, but he writes about facts and real-life statistics. If he does bring in his opinion, it is based on something concrete. The same is true for http://umsweetland.wordpress.com/. The difference, however, is the concentration. This academic blog does not solely discuss film art, but instead it talks about almost anything academic. For instance, there are posts about history and the Luddite's, but also random facts about the Sweetland Writing Center itself and its excellence and peer tutors. Although there is no specific focus on this blog, its posts are facts or opinions based on facts that are talked about so the reader can learn, but also formulate his/her own interpretations. This idea that I think is the essence of an academic blog is unlike the idea portrayed by the picture above. I believe that the picture is portraying two people, who first of all do not seem to like the idea of a blog, and have a "friend" who just started one where he can write his"insane opinions". This does not agree with my definition of an academic blog because it seems that the man is not writing to teach an audience about anything, rather he is probably looking to have a discussion with people about his opinions, theories, and ideas that could or could not be true. What do you guys think? Are these two blogs that I describe a difference between an academic blog and any other blog or am I missing something?
(photo from:http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2005/05/26/blogCartoon.jpg&imgrefurl=http://planning-research.com/academic-blog-friend-of-information-enemy-of-thought/&usg=__pTEx0wkYFpjH8Mv4CosA_-k4nvo=&h=436&w=600&sz=193&hl=en&start=0&sig2=HEIU5UWxNsZrws7oRkJX6Q&zoom=1&tbnid=tk1Igoccab8RbM:&tbnh=140&tbnw=193&ei=xDw7TeeuHIKB8gaDlpStCg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dacademic%2Bblog%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26biw%3D1042%26bih%3D706%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=344&oei=xDw7TeeuHIKB8gaDlpStCg&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=16&ved=1t:429,r:1,s:0&tx=62&ty=65)
Sophie,
ReplyDeleteI actually thought this exact same thing yesterday. What makes an academic blog "academic"? What's stopping me from declaring myself a professor in a modern category, creating a blog, and stating that it's academic? I myself came to the conclusion that an academic blog holds itself to higher standards then a blog on say tofu, but at the same time teaches and informs the reader on prevalent information on this topic. The true definitions of blogs aren't really defined, so at this point all we can do is accept any general definition, so in this case academic blogs are in my opinion simply professional blogs.
Sophie, many of the thoughts you had after viewing “academic blogs” were similar to mine. I really didn’t understand what put them on a higher pedestal than someone who was just blogging out of their basement. Something that I found interesting about many of these blogs was that they seemed to be far less interactive than the blogs we’ve studied thus far. I felt as if I was being talked down to by the authors on these websites…did anybody feel that way too? Something that you write about that I found to be interesting is how a blog must be written by a professor to be considered academic, I can’t possibly agree with this. Just because somebody can say they’re a professor at a local community college means that they’re now able to write an academic blog, but a researcher for IBM can’t? I think a possible solution to this question is something Brandon just brought up in his response post: academic blogs should simply be considered professional blogs, that way more people can write in an educational format.
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