Blogging and academia

I had a nice chance earlier this week to give a brief presentation to the latest round of faculty and staff taking the UVM Center for Teaching and Learning‘s “Blogging Your Course” workshop. One of the main things I always try to get across is that if the participants are only thinking about using blogs for their course(s) they’re missing out on what i think are the biggest effects blogs can have on their academic lives, something Fred Stutzman summed up really well this past week in a post called “Blogging: Academia’s Digital DIvide“.

I talked on Wednesday about the importance of reading blogs, something I’ve talked about before when speaking to new bloggers at UVM, and we also got everyone started using RSS readers so that they could understand how feeds work and see some of the great potential of RSS.

Starting to read blogs and creating your own personal/professional blog, to me, will have a far greater impact on one’s daily academic life than creating course blogs. Blogs are a great teaching tool and these days I can’t really envision myself teaching without a blog for each class, but if I had to choose one or the other I’d ditch my course blogs and keep my own one running.