Just read a great opinion piece by Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson, bloggers at the London School of Economics, on why blogging is one of the most important things an academic can do today. Their focus is on the quick dissemination -- for public consumption -- of academic research (and I quote):
... a new paradigm of research communications has grown up - one that de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication in which blogs play a critical intermediate role. They link to research reports and articles on the one hand, and they are linked to from Twitter, Facebook and Google+ news-streams and communities. So in research terms blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now.But in addition, social scientists have an obligation to society to contribute their observations to the wider world - and at the moment that's often being done in ramshackle and impoverished ways, in pointlessly obscure or charged-for forums, in language where you need to look up every second word in Wikipedia, with acres of 'dead-on-arrival' data in unreadable tables, and all delivered over bizarrely long-winded timescales. So the public pay for all our research, and then we shunt back to them a few press releases and a lot of out-of-date academic junk.Blogging (supported by academic tweeting) helps academics break out of all these loops. It's quick to do in real time. It taps academic expertise when it's relevant, and so lets academics look forward and speculate in evidence-based ways. It communicates bottom-line results and 'take aways' in clear ...
[view whole blog post
]
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
See More
Report Abuse