Academic and Professional Blogging
Editor’s Note: This post is one in a series about how technology can be used to develop and sustain one’s professional network. The idea for this post came from a think tank hosted by the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work in June 2019, looking for a way to teach students in their new online Doctorate of Social Program (DSW) program about how to develop key stakeholder networks in relation to a substantive topic area. In this series, we are exploring the concept of a Professional Collaboration Network (PCN), which are technology-mediated user-centered relationship constellations designed to enhance or enrich connections, knowledge, and professional opportunities. This post reviews how academic and professional blogging can be used to share and curate information for practice communities.
Blogs, and the act of blogging, have come a long way since the mid 1990’s when they essentially performed as personal journals published on the internet; they are now often fully fledged outlets for journalism, advocacy, and academic research (Smith, 2010, Kanter and Fine, 2010, Kirkup, 2010, Rosenberg, 2009). Although some may feel that blogging has become passé in the current and crowded social media landscape, others would argue blogging is alive and well (Fiesler, 2019; Perry, 2015). The main goal of this blog post is to describe why and how academic blogging can help contribute to your Professional Collaboration Network (PCN), and offer some basic tips for getting started. To learn more about PCNs, please read this post:
Today most people know what a blog is; in fact ,you are staring at one right now. The bigger question as academics or professionals is why would we want to develop/maintain a blog? Here we dive into just a few of the many answers to this question:
- Blogging can help make your research more accessible to the public;
- Blogging can demonstrate research impact for purposes of promotion and tenure;
- Blogging is a way to get formative feedback about your work;
- Blogging can provide more information or contextualize work shared during academic conferences;
- Blogging can help with reputation management and build your connection to an area of study.
Historically it has been challenging, and expensive, to obtain and read peer-reviewed research, but as social workers, it is very important that research is transferred from scholarly spaces to practice spaces. While news outlets have helped make scholarly work more digestible for the public via press releases and pop-science features, they often take the research out of context, and worse, misrepresent the work. Academic blogging keeps you in control of the messaging as you disseminate key points of your work.
When blogging messages for practice, consumers and even other researchers, you may want to consider ways to make the messages even more quickly digestible by using eye-catching tools such as infographics. These, too, have become more accessible through infographic creation tools like Canva and Piktochart. A podcast episode is another way to share the information and results, and the academic blog can be cross-referenced from these accessible products; they can also be inserted within the blog post for those who want to know more about your work or share it with others. Using visual graphics also helps make your blog or research more likely to be shared on the various social media platforms, thereby increasing your potential impact.
When blogging, it can be hard to tell whether your work is getting any traction in that space, so you might consider using page visit counts as a way to see if people are visiting your blog and which posts they are reviewing. If you are hoping to generate visits as a tool for public dissemination, you might start reading about best practices for generating blog traffic (which is a topic beyond the scope of this post). As your blog gets more popular, the reach and impact of your work will become more cross disciplinary and receive more attention.
Blogging and other social media like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Twitter can be useful for increasing the access and reach of your work. Tracking visits to these public dissemination sites can help demonstrate impact for some scholars on the tenure track. Academics can also write about their efforts to disseminate their work to public audiences in their promotion review narratives; this is a form of service to the community. It may also boost your formal citation count. In 2017, Jonathan Singer, of The Social Work Podcast, wrote about his own experience with using social media to increase his impact in this blog post – Using Technology for Social Work Scholarship: Creating and Sharing your Work. Other research has shown that sharing your work via social media and on open access sites can increase your citations (Niyazov et al., 2016), and many journal publications already encourage authors to share and promote their publications via social media.
What if you don’t have any peer-reviewed publications?
Blogging can still be useful to help you formulate your ideas and get feedback on your work. A growing movement around Public Scholarship suggests that scholarly and creative work be produced in partnership with the community, created for the public good, and publicly accessible. Part of this involves the Open Access movement where rigorous peer-reviewed research is made available immediately online by the publisher for feedback. Open Access is a great step in the right direction, but some journals make this challenging for authors with massive Article Processing Charges (APC). The reality is that academic blogging can overcome many of the hurdles standing in the way of completely free and open public scholarship.
Blogs can also serve as a placeholder for deeper information about an academic poster or research paper from a conference. Many of us have used QR codes to link our posters and presentations to our blogs so attendees are able to go get more information without having to bring copies of full papers or handouts. This not only helps save paper and weight when traveling, but the blog that shares your academic conference work opens up part of the conference to those unable to attend. A QR code is a specific type of bar-code that most smartphones can read with the camera application. Once scanned with the camera, the smartphone prompts the user to open a link to the embedded URL on the Internet. Creating QR codes is easy; try it by pointing your phone at the code in this blog, which will take you to a website that generates these codes. (Alternatively, you can click here).
You should not overlook the opportunity to build your reputation around your research or practice area through the use of your blog. Although academics are assessed mostly on reach of peer-reviewed papers, others will certainly use good-old-google to find experts. This includes politicians, people looking for conference keynotes, agencies looking for consultants, and nonprofits seeking program evaluators. For instance, you are reading this post on Dr. Hitchcock’s blog; she has been invited to train military members about professional social media use because of her blog presence. Co-author Sage has been hired by national nonprofits to build infographics based on those shared on her blog. Michaeli is an in-demand consultant and generates interest in her work primarily through online sources, including her PCN and other word-of-mouth generated from these sources. These are just a few examples, but we’d be remiss not to mention that all of us who co-authored this blogpost series met through our online PCNs and have since built collaborations like this one.
Although your PCN may mostly live on spaces such as Twitter or listservs, you can share your blog in any of these spaces to give your network more context about your work. (Helpful hint: post links to your public social media accounts at your blog!) We have found that members of our PCN community are eager to support their virtual friends and are sometimes more enthusiastic promoters of our work than we are! Tweeting a link to your blog enables you to embrace the participatory culture on social media and provides a way for others to connect with you and your ideas. One of the 20 Tips for building collaborative relationships on Twitter and steps in using Twitter for your Professional Collaboration Network (PCN) mentioned earlier in our series was to share good work and nourish your network and a blog exemplifies that principle.
Even if you don’t have your own work to blog about and share, curating work or topics and writing about them on your blog can be a helpful way to bring together a collection of work around a common theme that interests you. Curating, creating, and sharing are key ingredients to developing a PCN and your blog can serve as a home for content, commentary, and more.
By this point maybe you are getting excited or motivated to start blogging but still unsure where to begin. There are many resources on the web that can help you get started but we have a few tips to consider:
- Pick a platform like Blogger, WordPress, Wix, or SquareSpace if you want a stand-alone blog or one that can be connected to your website. Other platforms where you can post articles are LinkedIn and Medium.
- Think about your goal for your blog and your ideal audience; which of the reasons for academic blogging listed above is most important to you? Are you mostly trying to reach other academics and potential collaborators, practitioners, or consumers? Are you mostly looking for input on work in progress or trying to disseminate published research?
- Give your blog a name or use your own. The reality is you can always change your blog’s name, but take a moment to be mindful about the future of your blog, your professional identity, and what this space might mean. It’s not going to be set in stone but it can be helpful to be intentional.
- Think about purchasing a Domain name that is memorable.
- Connect your social media to the blog and use your social media to share your blog.
- Most importantly – WRITE. Revise (or don’t), share, and repeat. Some bloggers will encourage you to include photos, weblinks, or video, which is good advice. Others suggest keeping posts limited to less than 1,000 words since blogs are meant to be more concise and to the point, which is accurate, but your blog is your own and you can make it what you want.
The more you write on your blog, the more you will find your voice, and the more you write, the more you will have to share. This can help you build your PCN and may also have the added effect of boosting your scholarly writing and productivity as well. We would invite you to leave a comment below or share your own blog or those that you are most interested in.
References:
Fiesler, C. (2019, March 15). Why (and how) academics should blog their papers [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@cfiesler/why-and-how-academics-should-blog-their-papers-e6869559b8ea
Kanter, B., & Fine, A. H. (2010). The networked nonprofit: Connecting with social media to drive change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Kirkup, G. (2010). Academic blogging: Academic practice and academic identity. London Review of Education, 8(1), 75-84.
Niyazov, Y., Vogel, C., Price, R., Lund, B., Judd, D., Akil, A., … Shron, M. (2016). Open access meets discoverability: Citations to articles posted to Academia.edu. PLOS ONE, 11(2), e0148257.
Perry, D. (2015, November 11). 3 Rules of Academic Blogging. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/3-Rules-of-Academic-Blogging/234139
Rosenberg, S. (2009). Say everything: How blogging began, what it’s becoming, and why it matters. New York: Crown.
Smith, D.C. (2010). Social media correlates of organizational climate. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest. (Document ID 1986568531).
How to cite this post:
Young, J.A., Sage, M., Hitchcock, L.I., Bakk, L., Michaeli, D. & Smyth, N.J. (2020, April 24). Academic and Professional Blogging. [Blog Post]. Retrieved from Teaching & Learning in Social Work website: https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2020/04/24/academic-and-professional-blogging/
