The Ed Techie

A blogging downside

At one of the blogging talks I gave recently Niall Sclater asked me what were the downsides to academics blogging. I gave an unsatisfactory answer about it being a possible time sink and also you could get yourself in trouble saying things about people or projects. It occurred to me afterwards (I was always one of those people who had a witty reply two days after an event) that a very real downside for many academics is that it isn't recognised as a legitimate academic activity. For instance, there is no allocation for 'blogging' in my annual work plan. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think I have written fewer academic journal papers since becoming a serious blogger. If I was chasing promotion then blogging might be an activity I could ill afford alongside those that are deemed promotion-worthy.

As a Professor with the luxury of tenure I can, to an extent, ignore some of these pressures. That's kind of what tenure is about, although I like to think I pull my weight still on University projects. But if I were a hungry, ambitious lecturer seeking promotion to senior level, would blogging be a help or a hindrance?

Blogging vid

I have given two blogging talks recently (or more acurately, the same talk twice). I have used the following YouTube video. The quality isn't great and some people don't find it funny, but I think it's hilarious.

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:

Academic publishing - what's the point?

I had a message today saying that an article (The distance from isolation) I submitted to the journal Computers and Education has been published. Good news one might have thought, except check the date it was submitted - November 2004. That's three years to publish an article (admittedly it was available online a year after submission). Now, it's a good article and all that, but it's hardly current. For a start I address three technologies, but web 2.0 doesn't get a mention since the phrase hadn't been coined then. If I was writing it now, this would certainly form the crux of my argument (which thankfully has held up reasonably well).

Not all journals take this long to publish, but it does make you wonder what is the point of journal publication? In a classic example of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it seems that the function of journals is now to feed the Research Assessment Exercise. Initially the RAE used publications as an indication of the quality of research. Now it is the justification for the journals themselves. I learn a lot more from blogs now than I do journals, and I have also noticed that since keeping a blog I have published fewer 'proper' articles. Surely journals can't survive when they a) cost a lot of money, b) are out of date and c) don't facilitate the type of engaging debate you find in the blogosphere.

I know people will put down the marker of quality here, but I think a blog posting does undergo a form of peer review - if you post something stupid you can bet someone will tell you. And there are a host of metrics that indicate the quality of a blog, such as your technorati authority (mine remains doggedly low).

I've had some discussions with people at the OU about whether we should start encouraging and recognising blogging as an academic activity. I would like to see this,  but I don't want the RAE or the OU to start formalising the process, since this will stifle it. The moral here seems to be that formal metrics kill creativity. From a career perspective it is best to have a high ranking in the former, but for your own devlopment (and ultimately the health of the organisation), you want to be in the creativity camp.

Some more reasons to blog

In a recent post I mused on some reasons why educators should blog. Since then I've done my official 'thou shalt blog' report (incidentally, I am really enjoying running to Thou Shalt Always Kill which contains the excellent lines 'thou shalt not judge a book by its cover/thou shalt not judge lethal weapon by Danny Glover') in which I added a couple more:

• It exposes the process – much of the community of practice theory argues that being able to participate in a community novices should be able to observe, and to an extent participate with, experts in action. A blog is good means of allowing others to observe some of the less well thought out ideas and ongoing projects of an academic. This applies to both students and other members of staff, as Christopher Semmus argues, blogging represents a good model for mentoring within a university. James Aczel has started a blog for his course H809 during production, which will reveal many of the design decisions taken in the course, and potentially be a useful resource for future students on the course.
• It provides a useful tool for engaging with other technologies – the array of web 2.0 technologies can be quite daunting. However, many of these relate to blogging, and so by keeping a blog one is exposed to these technologies in a meaningful context. The technology required to keep a blog is fairly simple to use, so it is easy to get started, and then once your blog has momentum you may wish to explore some of the related tools and technologies. For instance Technorati is a site for ranking blogs, so you may want to claim your blog in here, and Feedburner is a means of allowing people to subscribe easily to your blog, while Slideshare allows people to embed their powerpoint presentations within their blog postings, and so on. By keeping a blog there is a motivation and a means to engage with many of the newer technologies that have potential benefits for our students.
• It's a good means of getting down, or building up, all those thoughts that never quite get in to journal papers. Either because journals are too restrictive (they'll want lots of data for any claim you make), or because you never get around to it, but I know that I for one, have an idea (or maybe it's an idealet) every day (okay maybe every week - month? go, on year then), which never finds an outlet and is then lost. The blog is a good means of capturing these, and over time they may find their way in to something more research recognisable.

Of all these I think the means of engaging with technology may be the most important. Your blog represents your homestead in the virtual world and even if you don't go in for a new widget every week, you will pick up on things, for instance it would be difficult to be a blogger in any subject and not know about Twitter, say (regardless of what you might think of it). More importantly it places you in 'the network' which you might is where any educator should want to be.

Open University bloggers

Following on from my previous post, I thought I would compile a list of current bloggers at the OU. Actually Tony Hirst had (as always) already done it, so the list below is mainly his. I've restricted it to blogs that have some life in them (a low threshold this one - one post this year is enough to qualify) and are by people working at the OU, ie not students (there is much more activity on the student front).

A couple of things strike me about the list: a) considering the size of the OU, it's not exactly big is it? b) most bloggers seem to be in the ed tech, programming, open learn side of things. My worry about this is that non ed techie people think that blogging isn't something relevant to them, and as they suspected all along, it's a nerd thing. I wonder how this list compares across other universities and what the differentiating factors might be? For instance does a top-down blogging initiative have any affect? Does the presence of one or two big name bloggers cause a trickle down? Does the institution's general attitude to technology influence uptake (for example, my guess would be that MIT has a stronger blog presence)?

Here is the list, I'd be happy to hear of any more:

Tony Hirst - http://ouseful.info

John Naughton - http://memex.naughtons.org/

Ray Corrigan - http://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/

Marc Eisenstadt http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/marc/

James Aczel http://h809.blogspot.com/

Doug Clow http://dougclow.wordpress.com

Patrick McAndrew - http://ochre.wordpress.com

Errm, me - http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/

Laura Dewis and Stuart Brown - http://conclave.open.ac.uk/openair

Alex Little - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/alex

Steve Godwin - http://openlearn.blogspot.com/index.html

Niall Sclater - http://sclater.com/blog/

Juliette White - http://www.jvvw.com/index.php

Graphics blog - http://blogs.open.ac.uk/LTS/csn47/

Guy Carberry http://conclave.open.ac.uk/guycarberry/

Library - http://libraryissues.blogspot.com/index.html

Mikele Pasin - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/mikele/blog

Peter Scott - http://sixfields.open.ac.uk/peterblog/index.html

Andrew Brasher - http://conclave.open.ac.uk/brasherblog/

Encouraging educators to blog

As part of the broadcast strategy review, I've been asked to produce a document that sets out how we can encourage more OU academics to engage with new technologies as part of their everyday practice (ie, not just for teaching purposes). I'm concentrating on blogging because I think it has a reasonable tradition (in the new definition of tradition which means anything older than 2 years) and is probably the most fruitful for academics. Most of my arguments will apply to the other technologies also, and I think you can use blogs as a springboard for a host of web 2.0 stuff.

Anyway, following on from my previous post I wanted to set out the motivations for educators to take up blogging. Here's what I've come up with so far, there is a bit of overlap between them:

• The economics of reputation – increasingly one’s reputation online is seen as a valuable commodity. This is partly because a good reputation is difficult to establish and also because in an environment where content is free and widely available then quality becomes a differentiating factor.
• Engagement with your subject area – in many subject areas the blogosphere is where much of the informed and detailed debate is occurring. If this is the case in your subject area then not to be part of it limits your expertise in the same manner as not publishing journal articles (perhaps even more so). If your subject area is not one widely engaged with blogging then this represents a good opportunity to establish yourself as one of the lead experts.
• Increased reflection – keeping a regular blog seems to encourage a degree of reflection and critical analysis as you comment on conferences, workshops, research, etc.
• Personal status and payback – being a recognised blogger in any field is likely to raise your profile and thus lead to increased requests for participation in projects, key note speeches, consultancy, invited papers, etc.
• Organisational status – as an institution the OU is not as prominent in the blogosphere as it should be. While company blogs tend to be rather bland, there is a positive image and potentially student recruitment effect for the institution if there are known to be a number of good bloggers in residence.
• Link to teaching – the type of content used in courses is increasingly diverse, and one model for including up to date information is to have feeds from a number of blogs incorporated in to teaching material.
• Eating our own dog food - increasingly students are encouraged to use blogs in courses, and so we should be demonstrating how they can be effective.

In a comment on my previous post Scott Leslie makes the good point that by being a blogger you build up a network of contacts, from people linking or commenting on your posts, plus the blogs you read and link to, which is invaluable in overcoming problems. Doug Clow also suggests that he had come to the stage where he couldn't do his job without blogging now.

Now, I know lots of people have blogged about this and must have run similar projects in their own universities, so I'd really appreciate any links or suggestions for further benefits for academics. It would also be kind of neat to say in the report that some of this report was produced through the benefits of blogging, demonstrating Scott's point.

Is blogging a good use of time?

Tony Karrer has been prompted by a couple of posts to consider whether use of web 2.0 technologies is viewed as wasting time by others. He asks:

Do people have enough time to use these tools? If so, does that mean that they are somehow not the people who are already "too busy" at their jobs? Are the only people who will use the tools exactly those people who the organization views as time wasters, tinkering about, etc.

Although he's talking about web 2.o technologies, I'll narrow it down to just blogging for some consideration. I have some sympathy with the people who think it is only for those with too much time on their hands, because I used to think the same.  Something along the lines of 'oh yes, it's fine for them to spend their whole day blogging, but I'm actually busy writing a course.' And I do still wonder how some people who have ten posts a day find time to do anything else. But of course I've come round in my thinking, even if I'm not the most prolific blogger on Technorati.

So, if you do think blogging is a waste of time, or you don't have enough time, let me try and convince you otherwise. Firstly, you should be prepared to put in some initial bootstrapping effort. Your blog won't be widely read overnight (if ever), and the paybacks I'm about to list need some critical mass of postings I think. It helps if you've got a project to specifically link to so you have some momentum behind it. For instance I was writing my VLE book when I started mine so I had lots of stuff in my head to get out.  There are lots of benefits in terms of reputation, marketing yourself, indirect payment (e.g. through consultancy) etc, but here I'm just going to concentrate on the ones relating to time.

i) You can direct people to your blog and save having to produce reports or documents. I often get in to conversations with people and they ask me to summarise things in an email and I simply send them to my blog, maybe with a specific tag e.g. 'look at the stuff I've written under the VLE tag'. It is probably still some way off, but in the future I would like to think that instead of producing a CV and letter of application for a job you could just send someone to your blog. That should give them a much better indication of whether they want to employ you.

ii) When you get in the habit it speeds up the process of recording your thoughts on events. I often sit in conferences or workshops thinking about the blog posting I will do (or sometimes actually doing it). This saves me having to write up notes afterwards and also helps me focus on what is important.

iii) It provides an easy dissemination point. For example I usually  put up my powerpoint on Slideshare and link it in my blog. A lot of people know this, so if they have missed a talk or want the slides from a talk they don't bother emailing me, they simply go to the blog.

iv) For the organisation it provides a knowledge transfer route. Now I'm not suggesting we do away with all workshops (biscuit suppliers need not fear for their trade), but an organisation that has a good set of regular bloggers has an efficient means of knowledge sharing which might be time consuming to realise in other ways.

So that's my reasons for how it repays the time spent on it, and that's not considering all the other benefits. I'm off to read my blog roll now...

Blogs as organisational dialogue

I know the idea of blogs as the new knowledge management tool isn't new, but it came home to me last week when we (some people from the OU with an interest in broadcasting) had a days workshop with some BBC people. Actually getting together with some of the smart, techie people there was really useful. But, as ever, the problem comes in how to move things forward. It seems clear to me that the  commissioning model that applies to traditional broadcasting doesn't work in the new context. Our overlap was more in areas of R and D than in creating specific programmes.

However, the last thing you want to do is set up some formal meeting structure, whereby we have quarterly meetings which become a chore, and in effect exist for their own function after a while, without getting anything done. What would have been really useful for me was if a few people at the BBC kept regular blogs, which I could subscribe to, and vice versa for them. Even if the blogs aren't aimed directly at us, you would pick up by osmosis what is going on, what the issues are, and who you might be able to collaborate with. Sadly, when I asked if any of them kept blogs I was told no, or if they did they were internal ones.

I had a mild demonstration of this a few days later when I had a call with some consultants who are looking at some of the broadcast issues for the OU. I talked about some e-learning, web 2.0, VLE issues, and then said 'look at my blog, and use the tags to find the relevant stuff.' They called it up while we were chatting and said 'great, we don't need to keep you any longer, we'll come back if we need anything else.'

Increasingly I think these light, by-product methods of exchanging information will be at the heart of the type of partnerships institutions will form. So, if you were looking for a reason to blog, there's another one.

My own blogging milestone

This is my 100th post, which I think means I can now officially call myself a blogger. I tried unsuccessfully to keep a blog several times before, so thought I'd reflect on why I had managed it this time. This is emphatically not a 'guide to becoming a blogger' since I don't think one person can tell someone else how to do that. Just my thoughts on my experience:

Firstly, I narrowed the focus. Previously I had tried to be a blogger for all people, but I found it necessary to have a specific subject area, in my case educational technology and e-learning. With this acting as a spine I could branch of occasionally in to other subjects (witness ramblings on football), but generally I found it easier to use this as a basis.

Secondly, I found an appropriate tone. I had struggled before with how to comment on, say, meetings I had been in. While 'X was their usual curmudgeonly self' may be true it is both libellous and not very interesting to others. So I tend to use the meetings as springboards for more general points.

Thirdly, I built up some momentum before I let people know about it. This was helped by writing a book at the time, so I had lots to say and time to say it.

Lastly, I began to think about everyday experiences in terms of blog postings. This can become quite obsessive. I sometimes feel like the character in 'The Grand Complication' who compulsively 'girdles' everything. Sitting in conferences I would consider what my posting would be, as a way of passing the time. Actually, thinking about postings is a very good means of engaging with the world on an analytical level. It makes you consider what the essence of the situation is, and how it relates to your personal experience and broader issues.

Looking forward, I wonder to what extent blogging will become an integral part of one's career profile. Just as some academics are essentially professional journal article writers, will some become predominantly bloggers. Blogging was something that I did in the occasional spare moment, but increasingly I feel it is central to what I do (if my boss is reading this - I still do lots of other stuff as well!).