Ten Tips for Academic Blogging

An academic blog isn't like other types of blogs. It isn't a Mommy blog, nor a political blog, nor a personal diary blog. It is a blog devoted to developing and sharing ideas. However, at the same time, an academic blog is not an academic paper. Student bloggers must balance their posts between less and more formality in what they post.

Here are 10 suggestions. Most of these are tips for good blogging in general, but toward the end the tips are more focused on academic sorts of blogging.

Notable Posts from DigiCiv Students

Blogging is a flexible medium, and as a new set of students gets accustomed to it, I think it would be helpful for them to know what we see as valuable in posts that have been created to date.


Posting or linking to prior academic work
Bryan Mulkern posted a paper he wrote about Jackson Turner's frontier thesis to contribute to a discussion of manifest destiny. Similarly, Brett Riley, as a follow up to class discussion, paraphrased a paper he'd written last semester about publishing and linked to his bibliography. Marcos Escalona, chiming in the copyright debate, also referred to a prior paper he'd written on the topic.


Posting critically
Not to encourage people simply to be contrary, but I admire when students have the courage to make reasoned cases contrary to popular opinion or to the explicit bias of the instructors. Both Brian Robison and Michelle Frandsen opposed open science (Brian: "Open Science and Why its a Bad Thing"; Michelle: "Open Science vs. Good Science"). David Perkins swam upstream with his "Three reasons why I stayed off the anti-SOPA bandwagon" as well as his post on why the Internet is a drug.

Renaissance, Reformation, and China

It's been such a pleasure to discover a series published by Oxford of very short introductions (to historical periods, famous people, and various -isms). Using my Amazon Prime account (which I love and students can get for free for a year) in two days and for $9 I had in my hands Jerry Brotton's The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction. In 125 brief pages, it gives a great overview of this period.

The image here is Raphael's fresco of the Donation of Constantine. There's Constantine, formally conveying secular authority of the Roman Empire to the Catholic Church.  I spoke about that document in the Digital Civilization class -- how Lorenzo Valla discredited it through linguistic analysis and proved it to be of medieval origins. What I didn't know