Let the Blogging Begin

Episode 10 of Digital Campus is now up and available for your listening pleasure. I can hardly believe that this is our 10th episode…time does fly when you’re having fun. In this episode Tom, Dan, and I discuss the ups and downs of academic blogging. Of particular note in this episode–at least from my perspective–is Dan’s discussion of anonymous blogging, an issue that arose earlier this month when the blogger PhDinhistory suddenly deleted his excellent blog (it has since returned) due to concerns over his identity being exposed.

I’m with Dan on the need for academic bloggers to put their names on their blogs–just as I also think that one of the big issues with Wikipedia is the anonymity of the vast majority of the contributors. I’ve been doing a lot of workshops for K-12 teachers this summer and I always spend 30-45 minutes on Wikipedia. It’s the anonymity of the contributors that bothers most of the educators I’ve spoken with about the issue–much more so than the constantly changing nature of the entries. The constant changing of entries does make teachers nervous, but not knowing who the person writing/editing the entry bothers them more. As one elementary school teacher put it to our workshop in June, “It could be one of my fourth-graders!”

So, saddle up your iPod and download the latest edition of our podcast. You’ll see our names and emails plastered all over the page. And if you want more text on academic blogging, you can read my 2006 essay on blogging in the classroom or Dan’s 2006 post on academic blogging.