Wednesday, September 29, 2010

On Blogging

Some interesting thoughts (by a blogger) about why young students and scholars should avoid blogging:

Academic Blogging: Some Reservations and Lessons

It's good advice for those who do blog too. In its immediacy, blogging can inhibit reflection.

Since I am obviously not following Blum's advice to avoid blogging altogether, I may as well mention that (1) Blum doesn't address the public service aspect of scholarship and (2) while I agree that peer review is important,  I am more inclined to put whatever "new" ideas I have out there because I think that there is something fundamentally broken about the way the academic publishing system works (more on this, hopefully, another time). Or maybe it's because I see myself as a גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב.

Here is another perspective mentioned in the comments to Blum's post: The Common School.

2 comments:

Charles said...

You both make some good points. For myself, I have two reasons for not blogging:

1. I don't have the time these days.
2. When I have tried my hand at blogging (Amanda asked me to do a psychology of religion series for her blog), I ended up producing five-page documents with thorough research behind them (I didn't want to look like a knucklehead). If I was to produce something like that for a blog on a sorta-daily basis... I should just write a book.

d. miller said...

Thanks for the comment, Chuck.

Random thoughts: Time is a big issue if one wishes to produce substantive posts. The instantaneousness of blog "publishing", on the other hand, can be somewhat addictive, and the exploratory nature of blogging means that I don't have to back up everything I say in the way I would if I were trying to publish something in a peer-reviewed venue.

I really enjoyed your psychology of religion series, by the way.