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.

How Do I Know When I'm Done?

We know that we've thrown a lot of new stuff at you in this Digital Civilization class so far, and this paradigm shift can be overwhelming, to say the least. A few of you have asked some very valid questions in the past couple days: How do I know when I've done enough? How can I be confident that I'm prepared for class?

Internet Piracy? Or Internet Censorship?

The music industry wants to turn your kids into pirates.  And not in the cute, dress-up way.  Take the case of Lenz vs United Music, in which the EFF sued United Music for sending a take-down notice to a woman who posted a short clip of her baby dancing to a Prince song that was playing in the background.  United was acting under the DMCA, a law passed in 2000 that allows copyright holders to notify a website that they must immediately remove infringing content.  In this case the woman was clearly within her rights of fair use of the copyrighted material, but as copyright holder, United would rather that this part of copyright law didn't exist.  When laws give copyright holders free reign over the system, the way the DMCA does, then they will use it to their advantage, eroding any rights that might be accorded to the public.

This situation promises to get even worse if SOPA passes.

Blogging and You

Up until now, to you blogging may have been something that your aunt did to keep the extended family in the loop or something your creative writer roommate did to put her work up online. You may not have thought about blogging in an academic context before, and the idea can take some getting used to.

I'm a big proponent of blogging in academic courses--I even wrote a research paper on the subject that I'm presenting at a conference in March. Blogging provides a way for you to synthesize ideas in writing and get them out there for your classmates and the world to see. However, the purpose of blogging in this course is bigger than that.

You see, part of becoming digitally literate is sharing your ideas and contributing to the online conversation. It's true that in this class, blogging will be a way for you to record your ideas, share them with your classmates, trace your learning process over time, and make progress toward your final projects. But more important than that, blogging is one of the most powerful ways for you to shape your online identity--an identity that will take on more and more importance if you wish to make an impact in our increasingly technological world.

In this post I'll outline some aspects of the blogging process in terms of Consume, Create, and Connect that will not only help you do well in the class, but will help you make your blog a vibrant learning record of lasting value to you and others and make your voice a part of the conversation.

Welcome to the Future: An Introduction

So you've been to the first day of Digital Civilization, and if you're anything like I was after my first day (and even first few weeks), you're feeling slightly panicky right about now.

What's going on?? This class is nothing like what I'm used to. Blogging? Google+? No set number of pages to read? No universal textbook? What in the world will I be graded on? What is this class?? WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO??? 

First of all, CALM DOWN. DON'T FREAK OUT. You are going to be okay--promise.

You are experiencing, in a way, a little thing called Future Shock.

Reinventing the Syllabus

The first modern syllabus
(Henry Adams, Harvard, 1876)

For the average college student, a course syllabus is a critical form of information. In fact, without one they would feel as lost as if one took away their cell phone. Well, maybe not that lost.

In Digital Civilization we follow a teaching philosophy that is somewhat at odds with the course syllabus as traditionally conceived. We use a syllabus, but we do not wish for this course, or for our students' education more generally, to be syllabus-driven.