Blogging workshop

I ran a blogging workshop the other day with Tony Hirst. It was only a small audience but seemed to go well. My main aim was to get across the idea that keeping a blog is both an academically valid activity and also really beneficial for the individual. I used most of the reasons I have listed before here and here. For me I would say the two strongest points are that it provides a useful means of engaging with technology, a base camp in the online world as it were, and that of all the academic activity I engage in, blogging is the one I probably enjoy the most (apart from having drinks in a bar at a conference in Hawaii, say, which is also quite nice). It is where a lot of the stuff you came into academia for in the first place, but has been eroded by increased administration, workloads and formal metrics (casts disapproving look at RAE), still persists - for example, lively debate, creativity, new ideas, good humour, collegiality, the progressive development of half-formed concepts through dialogue, etc.

A small aside - I tried to make the presentation more graphics heavy and less word intensive. In other words I was trying to increase its glanceability - it took me a lot longer to produce, with the inevitable conclusion that glanceability is hard. Reminds me of the Nathaniel Hawthorne quote 'Easy reading is damn hard writing.'

Slideshare file below:

Comments

[Rebecca]

Althugh you say it was a small audience - I think you should also mention that the room was packed and that, although only 15 people were officially allowed to attend, more and more of us kept sneaking in.
Glanceable slides are more difficult to produce - but they make for a far more interesting talk, I think. I was discussing with another audience member last night how well your image-heavy slides worked.

[Martin]

Thanks Rebecca, I gave the talk again yesterday at the PBL CETL, so I'm building up the blogging momentum!
Martin