Blogging as a form of Digital Scholarship

Last year we spoke with Dr. Eilís Ní Dhúill about the Thesis Talk (https://thesistalk.wordpress.com) blog at NUI Galway. The blog is written by PhD candidates from the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Celtic Studies. Chronicling the varying experiences of the College's research students, it provides a platform to describe and share PhD experiences, research, feedback from conferences attended, and to ask the community questions or give tips and advice. 

Her account of Thesis Talk is well worth a listen. She outlines how openness and sharing of knowledge are manifested through scholarly blogging. The benefits include connecting with a community of peers, developing writing skills, and engaging in open knowledge production and sharing.

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Why I blog

Image by andyp uk on flickr 

A couple of weeks ago, as part of an informal lunchtime conversation session on the topic of Academic Blogging, Simon Warren (@worried_teacher) invited me to speak, along with John Danaher (@JohnDanaher), on my blogging experiences. This forced me to take some time and reflect on my own practice as a blogger, what I blog about and why. So, thank you Simon for giving me the purpose to reflect.

John blogs at philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.ie and is a prolific blogger. He admits to spending between 10 to 15 hours per week on his blog, writing an average of 2 lengthy posts each week. His writing is habitual and he starts most days writing at least 1000 words. He writes for research purposes and much of what he writes is repurposed for papers and articles. 

Clearly I am not nearly in the same league as John Danaher, but listening to him speak, I realised that some of our reasons for blogging are similar. 

 
The LearnTechGalway blog

This blog first started as a conference blog in May 2007, and has since accumulated more than 400 posts, with various authors from the Learning Technologies team at NUI Galway. We use the blog to document our work; to highlight and showcase the work of others; to share information about upcoming events; to document events we've hosted or attended; and to network with other groups.

The audience for the blog is the university community at NUIG and a broader network of academic, academic-related and educational technology people nationally and internationally.

Writing for me

But actually, my primary audience is myself! As a non-academic, there is not the same pressure on me to write; but as a former academic (who is still interested in research) I find that blogging provides me a platform to articulate and make sense of the world around me. John described something similar - he uses his blog to explain things to himself. 

When I first started blogging (in 2007), my contributions were short and factual. I blogged about news, gave details on upcoming events and wrote up conference reports. The conference and event reports developed as I started to reflect more, and began to put my ideas in writing. As my online identity continues to develop, through blogging and Twitter and other social tools, my blogger's voice has also continued to develop. It is still not a confident voice, but that is something that I would like to work on. 

So, blogging, for me, supports my own professional self development, allowing me to reflect, and helping me to shape my identity, both online and in real life.

Me as an open practitioner

It has also become important to me that I reflect openly and I'm working to become more of an open practitioner. This is not necessarily a comfortable place to be, especially as a woman online. But through blogging and twitter in particular I have developed a pretty good (and constantly shifting) personal learning network (PLN).

The value of the network is manifest in multiple ways. The feedback from comments on the blog or on twitter (or LinkedIn or Medium or wherever they happen to be) reminds me that I'm part of a wider community, but also supports the development of my thinking. Blogging can also result in unexpected opportunities for research or collaborative work, such as my chapter in David Hopkins' Really Useful #EdTech Book last year.

This post has taken me a couple of weeks to complete (though you wouldn't know that to read it). Yesterday I had the immense pleasure of hearing Joseph O'Connor speak at the National Summit for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. As well as providing the hugely accurate description Writing is like attempting to juggle with mud he also said

Learning is a way of seeing, again, a way of looking at the world 

I think blogging does this too. And blogging is part of my learning.

See Also..

Can blogging be academically valuable - by John Danaher

Blogging helps academic writing - by Pat Thomson

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Documenting BbWorld14

I am sitting in the airport at Philadelphia, waiting for the next stage of my journey to BbWorld14 in Las Vegas. It seems a very long time since I set off, early this morning, from Galway. I got the 5:15 CityLink bus from Galway to Dublin airport, accompanied by my 12 year old daughter, who is spending a few days with family in Dublin. 

As we sat into our seats, my daughter took out her mobile phone, connected to wifi, attached her ear buds and proceeded to ignore me for the whole 3 hour journey. As we left Galway, I was surprised that she started taking photographs out the window - it was dark - and posting them on snapchat and Instagram. Then I realised that she was starting to document her visit to Dublin, which is probably almost as exciting for her as my trip to Las Vegas. Maybe she's a future blogger?

In contrast to her single device, I am travelling with at least four (five if you count my watch - which I still use to tell the time). I have my phone and my iPad, to keep me connected. But I also have my 8 year old iPod, which I use for my music, and my kindle, for proper reading. I don't like extended reading on the iPad, although the kindle app does come in handy. And I have my whole music collection on the iPod, so why would I take up extra space on my phone? Evidently it's a generational thing - or is it?

Of these, my phone and iPad will both be used to document BbWorld14, in a variety of ways. 

During the conference, I will be tweeting my most immediate thoughts and reactions, using the conference hashtag. I will also be taking photographs, with my phone, and tweeting some of these. I haven't got comfortable using the iPad for taking photographs - it just seems too big and awkward. 

While tweeting is immediate, and can be conversational, it can also provide a useful archive after the event - the nearly now. A tool like storify can be used to collect together a more permanent record of an event. For example, I created a recent archive of the twitter feed at 6IIPC. 

But of most value, to me, and hopefully also to you, dear reader, is when I manage to reflect a little bit, and put something more connected and considered into a blog post. Sometimes this can happen quite quickly, and sometimes it takes a little longer to let the ideas take shape. But I've already had 3 hours on a bus, 7 hours on a plane, and quite a bit of time hanging round airport lounges today, so hopefully this one makes a little sense. 

In the last little while I have noticed David Hopkins, in particular, making use of sketchnotes. This is something I would love to try, and I am told you don't require artistic talents. I have gone so far as to download Mike Rohde's book The Sketchnote Handbook to my kindle, but haven't tried the techniques yet. Maybe this is the event to start. 

So, I will be interested to see the other BbWorld 14 bloggers, and what devices and techniques they use. What is your approach to documenting events?