Academic Blogging: Publication, Service or Teaching?

Over on Hypotyposeis, Stephen Carlson asks the interesting question Academic Blogging: Publication or Service?

A friend of mine at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society (NAPS) reported that a speaker at a session on scholarly publishing observed that blogging tended to count more as service instead of publications for one’s academic career (read: tenure and promotion). On the face of it, this observation seems plausible--one’s web work does count, but not as a replacement for publishing. My questions are: is this really the case? and is this a good way to evaluate the role of blogging in conjunction with one’s academic career?

This is a question that I have occasionally discussed here, and it is one of interest to any of us who spend a lot of time blogging. Frankly, I do sometimes ask myself whether the time I spend blogging (or on the NT Gateway, or other web projects) would have been better spend writing more books and articles. But always, in the end, I decide that it is a worthwhile chunk of time, not least because blogging and web work occupy a space that overlaps with all the other elements in an academic's life, teaching, research and service. Its relevance for research and writing is obvious -- it is a place to develop one's ideas and to try out new things, often in discussion with others.  Scholarship is a communal and not a solitary activity, and blogging at its best can underline the communal nature of good scholarship.

In a previous discussion on this kind of topic, Should Blogs Count for Tenure?, I responded to the question of how I would assess applicants who were bloggers:

I know that I would always look favourably on someone who has an intelligent and energetic blog, whether as potential applicants to a graduate programme, or as job applicants, or as applicants for tenure. To me it is likely to suggest several things, a commitment to the dissemination of scholarship outside of the guild, a commitment to collaborative scholarship, and some degree of courage and public risk-taking. So I would be strongly inclined to treat blogging as a plus. I suppose that this is what Davidson means in her reference to blogging as fulfilling the all important "service to the guild" requirement for gaining tenure. [Context here] But I think that it is potentially much more than that. For one thing, blogs can be continuous with published work, so that the lines between publication and blog are blurred. In those cases, it's not a bolted on extra, but is integral to the research and publication process. One might even be using the blog as a means of developing published materials. There are multiple examples of this kind of thing as when people develop conference papers on-line and then use a blog as a means of doing research, gauging reaction and improving the output.

However, I think that now I would want to stress more the role that blogging can play in good teaching, as a place to discuss elements that come up in the process of teaching, to reflect on how things have gone, or to try out new ideas. I suspect that it is this latter category that actually weighs most strongly with appointment, promotion and tenure committees, and I would be inclined to stress this element in the obligatory category on "innovation" in teaching. A blog in which teaching methods and content is discussed is a demonstration of one's commitment to thinking through pedagogy.

Blogging and Tenure 2

On Sunday I posted on the topic Should Blogs Count for Tenure? in response to Cathy Davidson's post of that title on Hastac. Kathy Asselin, a graduate student at Wayne State University, gets in touch as a result of that post, and asks if I would respond to four questions. I am answering them here:

1. How would you define the term blogging?

On occasions like this, I tend to have a look on Wikipedia to see if the multiple users there have come up with a good definition that might nicely encapsulate blogs and blogging, and on this occasion I am not disappointed:

A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of most early blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

The term "blog" is a portmanteau, or, in other words, a blend of the words web and log (Web log). "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

I would be foolish to try to improve on that.

2. What blogs-- including academic, institutional, corporate, business, or personal--do you currently participate in?

I am the author of this blog (NT Gateway Weblog), which has been running for three and a half years. It is an academic blog focusing primarily on academic New Testament teaching and research. Although my employer's name appears in the heading, it is not sponsored by my employer and is hosted on my own server. Since it is an academic blog, I try to avoid straying into personal interests, and I try to avoid commenting on issues on which I have no expertise. I do occasionally discuss issues of general interest in higher education since I see those as relevant to the general context of the blog.

I also guest post occasionally (approximately every week or two) on my wife's blog, The Americanization of Emily, which is a more of a personal / family blog in which we reflect on the experience of being a British family living in America. Come to think of it, this provides a useful illustration of the general point. I would never mention this blog in professional academic materials, CV etc., because of its personal, non-academic nature. It is a quite different thing from an academic blog in spite of the fact that it belongs in the same broad genre (blog).

3. How could blogs be utilized in education?

This is a huge question. We are only at the beginnings of seeing how massive blogs will become in education. Imagine someone saying in 1994, "How could the internet be utilized in education?" and that's the kind of stage we are at. Many university teachers are already using blogs successfully in their teaching. An example in our area is Jim Davila at the University of St Andrews who is currently running the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Blog in association with a course he is teaching. I have not experimented with that yet myself, though I do often blog about topics related to my teaching, and write sketches of things I will be teaching, or write notes and reflections on things I have taught, all of which help to improve the quality of my course offerings -- I hope.

A blog can be hugely helpful in one's research, in developing one's ideas, in engaging directly with others, in disseminating research and so on. I suppose one of the ways in which I find it particularly useful is in the live interaction that blogging generates. When I publish an article, I have to wait months (at least) and years before I receive published responses, and frequently those responses do not engage in detail with the case (you know, a footnote here, a citation there). And by the time that the published reactions to one's published works comes in, one is already working on other things, and one's mind is sometimes elsewhere. I am overstating the point, but I hope you see what I am saying. Academic blogging, on the other hand, allows you to get feedback and to interact while you are at the stage of developing and articulating your ideas, while the topic is fresh, interesting and lively and while you have the energy to pursue it with others. I see this as a major step forward in the academic life, and especially in taking forward the extra mural vision of the best universities and the most conscientious scholars. This is a point I could talk and talk and talk about, and no doubt I will return to it on this blog in the future.

4. Is it possible that online publications such as blogs could be used in developing a new metric in determining tenure for assistant professors and promotion -- which include higher ranks as well-- at university?

This is the question that began my interest in this topic, having read Cathy Davidson's answer. My first answer is here in Should Blogs Count for Tenure? but I hope to comment a little more in due course, partly in response to others who have commented on the question and who are less positive than I about the possibilities. At this point, let me just summarise my thoughts by saying the following: Appointments, Promotions and Tenure Committees, if they are doing their job thoroughly, should be looking at all aspects of a candidate's academic career. If a given candidate has a successful, well respected academic blog, to which s/he had drawn attention in the documentation, that candidate has a right to expect the committee to take it seriously and, if the academic quality is indeed strong, for it to be favourably regarded in the application. I suspect that in years to come we will be surprised that we even found ourselves asking the question, in the same way that now no one would seriously entertain doubts about drawing attention to well constructed academic websites in one's applications for appointments, promotions and tenure.

Should Blogs Count for Tenure?

Over on Hastac, my Duke colleague Cathy Davidson provides some answers to the interesting question, "Should Blogs Count for Tenure?". The gist of her response is that they can make an important contribution to academic service, typically one of the three pillars on which tenure stands, the others being teaching and research. She adds that there may be a contribution to teaching too, depending on the nature of the blog and the teaching. Turning to research, she asks:

Is it research? Depends entirely on the nature of what is blogged. And since the whole point of blogging is to avoid refereeing, to be able to get out one’s ideas unmediated, the scholarly definition of research as a peer-reviewed, refereed contribution to knowledge is not fulfilled by blogging. Definitionally these are opposites.

I think there is something in these comments, but I am not sure that I would see "the whole point of blogging" as "to avoid refereeing". In some respects, I think blogging can hold one up to a higher standard of refereeing than published work because there are so many more people who are commenting on one's ideas and thoughts as they are in process. It is an inherently more risky process than the much more sedate and private world of peer review. Of course I agree about the importance of peer review, but I don't think I see blogging as being at the opposite end of the spectrum as this. Rather, it's a different kind of peer review, with its own strengths and weaknesses (Davidson later notes that it is peer reviewed "in a Web 2.0 way" but I think that that short-sells it). Prof. Davidson goes on:

In fact, it makes me suspicious when someone protests that their blog gets so many hits while their scholarly articles receive so many fewer and therefore they don't need to publish in order to get tenure. That fails logically. Tenure is an agreed upon system of accountability and reward, as fallible as any such system and as susceptible to abuse.

If someone is making comments like that, then they need a serious reality check because frankly they are not going to get tenure with an attitude like that. But I know that I would always look favourably on someone who has an intelligent and energetic blog, whether as potential applicants to a graduate programme, or as job applicants, or as applicants for tenure. To me it is likely to suggest several things, a commitment to the dissemination of scholarship outside of the guild, a commitment to collaborative scholarship, and some degree of courage and public risk-taking. So I would be strongly inclined to treat blogging as a plus. I suppose that this is what Davidson means in her reference to blogging as fulfilling the all important "service to the guild" requirement for gaining tenure. But I think that it is potentially much more than that. For one thing, blogs can be continuous with published work, so that the lines between publication and blog are blurred. In those cases, it's not a bolted on extra, but is integral to the research and publication process. One might even be using the blog as a means of developing published materials. There are multiple examples of this kind of thing as when people develop conference papers on-line and then use a blog as a means of doing research, gauging reaction and improving the output.

One of the underlying issues here may be the undue stress placed on peer-review in the American tenure system. I am new to this system, and the word "tenure" is only known in the UK as something American academics talk about, but it may be that it is important for appointments, promotions and tenure committees to think about peer review as only one, albeit important element in reviewing a scholar's output. Why not look more widely to what are called "esteem indicators" in the UK, and think of strong, successful academic blogging as one of those "esteem indicators"?

Promotion and Tenure Criteria for New Media

Some of those brave pioneers who have celebrated what the internet has to offer the experience of university teaching, and who have looked towards the internet to enhance their offerings, may well have found it somewhat frustrating to find that their initiatives have not always met with wholehearted endorsement from their bosses. I am one of the lucky ones. I was in an institution (the University of Birmingham, Dept of Theology and Religion) that was open to initiatives in electronic media, and I always felt supported and encouraged in my attempts to try new things, something that was often controversial, especially in the relatively early days of the world wide web. Although I would not have managed promotion in that system if I had focused solely on electronic media for teaching and research, I did feel that the use of electronic media, especially in teaching, was recognized and valued. I think the same was true here in getting tenure in the Duke University Dept of Religion too, a sense that while print publications were paramount, the use of electronic media played a reasonable supporting role. I make these remarks to make clear that I have no personal axe to grind here, because it is clear that not everyone feels this way about their institutions, and I have talked to some scholars who have been pioneers in the use of internet resources in academia who have not felt supported by their institutions. It is felt that print publications will always trump the internet, and recognition will not be forthcoming for those who spend too long staring at their computer screen.

One of the difficulties is that in some institutions, those involved with appointments, promotions and tenure, have not yet realized how rapidly the scene has changed in the last decade or so, and just how valuable it can be to have academics who invest a lot of time and energy in new media. It is encouraging, therefore, to see reference on The Stoa Consortium to this piece from the University of Maine:

New Media Department, University of Maine
Promotion and Tenure Guidelines Addendum: Rationale for Redefined Criteria
New Criteria for New Media

ABSTRACT: An argument for redefining promotion and tenure criteria for faculty in new media departments of today's universities.

As the Stoa post comments, "It seems to provide an excellent point of departure for a discussion of how to include a proper assessment of new media contributions in the tenure and promotion processes in Humanities and Social Sciences." I agree. I hope to see other universities following suit.