In the chronicle, Inside Higher Ed., Jeff Rice laments what he sees as academics being afraid to blog, unless they blog anonymously. He talks of the warnings of "the dangers of blogging. Blogging will ruin your career! Blogging will prevent you from getting a job! Blogging will ... fill in the blank."

Instead, he says, academics should be playing more with the digital form, content and genre. His article produced some controversy and irritation by people in the academic blogging world, including Lisa of IT who pointed out that many people have been fired for blogging and that not everyone has tenure. Others, like New kid on the Hallway, are annoyed by his complaint that academics aren't doing enough "amazing things (that) blogging has provided writers: ability to create discourse in widely accessed, public venues, ease of online publishing, ability to write daily to a networked space, ability to archive one’s writing, ability to interlink writing spaces, ability to respond to other writers quickly, etc."

Leslie Madsen Brooks summarises more of the arguments that are taking place in academic blogoshpere in Academics Anonymous over in BlogHer. (And as she points out, some of the best bits of the discussion if you are interested is in the comments that follow different people's posts. )

I wonder how blogging from Higher Education is affected in Portugal with so many of us hanging on to our contracts by our teeth as we drown in the extra Bolonha related work and are offered the stick rather than the carrot for researching, developing and experimenting. Does it - or could it - make us more or less playful with the blogging genre? I think this could be an interesting topic for the Encontro sobre Weblogs at Universidade do Porto in October.

Categories: Reflections, Artifacts

Technorati Tags: 3encontro , academicblogging