On Academic Blogging and Tenure

Pencarian informasi berkenaan "Research blog for Academician" dimulai diruangan Google Blog dan kata kunci itu telah mengindex satu laman blog yang cukup bermanfaat untuk dikongsi bersama. Sama-sama kita baca petikan dari laman blog berkenaan. sekian.

I do believe that more academics should blog. Blogging offers both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards to academic researchers. It pushes us to write clearly for an audience, sharpening our writing and thinking. It provides immediate gratification, sorely absent from the peer-review process.

It raises your profile within the field, which can yield additional research opportunities.  It lets you speak to wider audiences, which can help allay bouts of existential angst and answer difficult questions during holiday visits with relatives.

My own blogging experience has been positive in all these ways.  Most of my peer-reviewed articles have begun as blog posts (“Understanding Blogspace,” “Macaca Moments Revisited,” “Online Political Mobilization from the Advocacy Group’s Perspective,” and “Implications of the Mobile Web for Online/Offline Reputation Management” all got their start at shoutingloudly).  

I’ve also enjoyed the experience of attending conferences and being told “oh, I read your blog post last week.”  As a young scholar in a nascent field, it still comes as a shock to learn that someone other than my mother reads this thing!

I generally try to write out an idea when it is fresh. Sometimes it gets helpful feedback from readers in the comment section.  More often it just forces me to clearly explain what my point is. After months of losing myself in the research, this provides a lodestone of sorts. Being able to go back to the initial impetus sharpens the mind and helps you dig an argument out the mess of data.

Perhaps more importantly, blogging helps to shape my research agenda.  The process of writing for an audience leads me to flesh out lines of thought that otherwise would stay murky. Those, in turn, drive the course of my research.  Being an active blogger makes me a more active scholar.

That said, we should acknowledge two limitations on academic blogging: it is bite-sized and it is not (yet) a central forum in academia.

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