{"id":955,"date":"2011-10-09T11:56:22","date_gmt":"2011-10-09T10:56:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=955"},"modified":"2011-10-09T11:56:22","modified_gmt":"2011-10-09T10:56:22","slug":"blogging-about-writing-about-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2011\/10\/09\/blogging-about-writing-about-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"Blogging about writing about blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, the Open University's Gill Kirkup published<\/a> Academic blogging: academic practice and academic identity in the London Review of Education<\/em>. \u00a0Although this is a small study, I found it a thoughtful reflection on the purposes, practices (and pitfalls) of academic blogging. \u00a0I'd recommend it as handy reading whether you already blog \u2013 or are thinking of taking it up. \u00a0 I found many of my own thoughts about blogging in this piece, particularly about identity, audience, self-censorship and the costs it imposes on other forms of writing.<\/p>\n

For example, Kirkup notes<\/p>\n

There was a strong indirect relationship between the writing people did in their blogs and other professional academic writing.\u00a0 As they became familiar with the medium of blogging they were surprised to find that it had its own rules, it was not simply a notebook, or a place for making drafts which might be turned later into full scholarly publications.\u00a0 When it worked well there could be synergy between blogging and other writing. \u00a0But the entire sample described how blog texts were different from other texts, and demanded care and effort to produce at quality. \u00a0\u2018Dr C\u2019 described this very clearly:<\/p>\n

I fondly imagined that a blog would be a good way of getting ideas off the ground for\u00a0papers and proposals and things like that \u2013 it doesn\u2019t do that \u2026 the initial draft of a paper often looks like a blog post and I could just post it\u2026 but I don\u2019t choose to because it doesn\u2019t feel finished.<\/em><\/p>\n

He described how a paper is reworked with gaps and un-evenness, while a blog post has to have its own sense of being \u2018complete\u2019. \u00a0\u2018Dr C\u2019 also described what he calls the \u2018hierarchy of levels of reflection and thinking and effort\u2019 that go into creating texts for different media. \u00a0He \u2018bangs out a tweet\u2019, but a blog takes a little bit longer. \u00a0\u2018Professor R\u2019 also described how he composed his blog posts like \u2018little articles\u2019. \u00a0 He considered their length (about 500 words) and tried to make them a \u2018rounded piece\u2019. \u00a0 He estimated that it took him about two hours to create a blog post. \u00a0 \u2018Dr K\u2019 who has also published extensively in traditional academic media found that the blog fed into her other writing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year, the Open University's Gill Kirkup published Academic blogging: academic practice and academic identity in the London Review of Education. \u00a0Although this is a small study, I found it a thoughtful reflection on the purposes, practices (and pitfalls) of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}