(I found another old post, hey is running this blog?) Note- this is 1000% snarky satire. Place your sarcasm sensors on high…. I typically include pictures of myself in my blog posts. Why? Well doesn’t it explain itself? Why just look at me. I just love looking at me so much, its quite natural the […]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Iago A.R. Just because you can, does it mean you should? An interesting series of events, but I am left baffled as to why some web site would feel its okay to republish my blog post in its entirety, with the barest minimum of attribution. In this morning’s email […]

Liz Lawly recently shared a great collection of edublogger’s explanations for why they blog:

I keep getting asked this question by colleagues here at RIT and elsewhere, and I find myself sending them the same links over and over again. So here’s what I give people who ask me this, in an attempt to clarify the value of blogging to those of us in academia. It’s not all about personal confessionals. Really.

These are great, useful, but in a way, like asking devout Apple users “Why they use a Mac?” I am curious about the flip side, why academics do NOT blog, what keeps them from it, what are the barriers, perceived or real?

I’ve been musing on this for a while, as I have created blogs for teachers and techies in our system that have various life spans from weeks to months. It is also curious in light of interests in our system in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), sprouting from the Carnegie Foundation’s movement— where a central tenet is being “public with our work as scholarly teachers” — what could be more than public than a blog?

And while the buzz is high among edu-techies for electronic portfolios, the prospect of an easy to use, comprehensive, portable, enterprise life long tool is on the 8 to never year horizon (don’t bark back about the ones in existence, I know about them, I know about the successful systems in place, but they are not near mainstream). So you can sit back and wait for the perfect tool or do something NOW which can catalog your accomplishments, projects, reflections, artifacts — a blog.

Following is mostly my own conjecture and speculation on why the blog updatke is slow, and is part of a later to be summary of how our faculty leaders are doing with using the blogs+wikis+discussion boards to document our Ocotillo project.