Abstract
This research project investigated how openness and sharing of knowledge are manifested through scholarly blogging. We aimed to identify the academics’ and researchers’ motivations for starting a blog; the contribution of blogging to their personal and professional development; and any challenges. Twenty-six participants were recruited. A pre-interview questionnaire was first emailed to the participants to collect background information. An initial unstructured interview was conducted by email, followed by a synchronous semi-structured interview. Textual and visual extracts of blog content were also collected. The datasets were analysed using different techniques. The findings revealed varied reasons for blogging. Some academics/researchers began a blog for its accessibility to self and others. Blogging aided the academics’ and researchers’ personal and professional development in several ways. Bloggers can quickly reach a wider audience compared to other forms of academic publishing. Among the challenges, there were concerns over validity of online content. Based on previous scholarship models and on our findings, we have derived an empirically grounded framework of blog use in academia and research. The framework describes how characteristics of digital scholarship such as openness and sharing are manifested through blogging. The framework can be used to guide academics and researchers who are interested in taking up blogging as a scholarly practice.Keywords: academic blogging; research blogging; openness; digital scholarship; open scholarship(Published: 30 August 2012)http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v20i0.19195
Highlights
We investigated the blogging practices of individual academics and researchers
We looked at the motivations for their starting and maintaining a blog as part of their scholarly practice
Our research aimed to investigate blogging as an academic practice and to understand how it can impact on the learning technology community
Summary
We investigated the blogging practices of individual academics and researchers. We looked at the motivations for their starting and maintaining a blog as part of their scholarly practice. We examined the benefits and challenges of blogging in academia and research. The empirical investigations involved collating experiences of participants in different higher education institutions (HEIs) and countries, and from varied subjectdisciplines. Our research builds on previous studies on the use of social software in education, and on blogging in particular, which have generally been small-scale. The concept of ‘‘digital scholarship’’ is increasingly being used to refer to the use of social software in academia and research. Examples of social software tools are blogs, wikis, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), social-networking platforms
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