cogdogblog: Flipping the Question:"Why DON'T Academics Blog?" Comments and Trackbacks

CDB Entry: Flipping the Question:"Why DON'T Academics Blog?"

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 11:00:08 -0700

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....

comment by: Scott Leslie

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 13:48:48 -0700

I think all of these get at part of it. On top of any conventional notion of there existing a real 'digital divide' there's also I think the very real case that even those people on the 'online' side of the 'divide' are not all online in the same way. Some of us (many of whom comprise a lot of the current academic bloggers) are online 8 hours a day, 7 days a week (you get the idea - we *live* there). We get the value of establishing online identity, voice, knowledge base and all the other motivations for blogging, in part becuase we've been doing it long enough to recognize the need and the paucity of past alternatives.

But for many, many others, the internet is still defined by one or two very thin slices of what you can do (send email, create a website, post in a forum...) and for any one of these 'thin' slices the usefulness of blogs seems questionable. That's one of the hardest things to get non-bloggers to understand about the value of blogging (and why I emphasize 'blogging' as a verb and not 'blogs' as a noun) is that it's valueable precisely because it (potentially) addresses so MANY aspects of one's life online, and until you appreciate all the things your life online can be and all the challenges that using standalone, solitary, non-web-based, non-XML-based tools present to trying to achieve this, it's hard to understand why we bloggers are so damned enthusiastic about it.

But that too will change, as will blogging and its tools, until at some point we evolve a well matched and adopted suite of tools that manifest all the good aspects of blogging and bring them together with many more aspects of 'life online' than just reading/writing. Wow, too much coffee!

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Sun, 10 Apr 2005 13:47:49 -0700

Excerpt: Academic Blogs - why or why not?
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Tue, 01 Mar 2005 10:20:46 -0700

Excerpt: cogdogblog : Flipping the Question: "Why DON'T Academics Blog?" A different point of view.
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Fri, 25 Feb 2005 18:02:10 -0700

Excerpt: cogdogblog : Flipping the Question: "Why DON'T Academics Blog?" A different point of view.
��Weblog: Thoughts in and out of my mind...
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Sat, 12 Feb 2005 10:15:25 -0700

Excerpt: Flipping the Question:"Why DON'T Academics Blog?" .
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Fri, 11 Feb 2005 17:45:33 -0700

Excerpt: From "cogdogblog": 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
��Weblog: teachnology
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