Are Blogs Changing Academic Discourse?

How can we use blogs in the college classroom? How should we archive the best blogs in our culture? Who should rank blogs according to their academic and cultural validity? Should we allow only corporations to rank blogs according to traffic? How will blogs continue to influence academic and cultural discourse?

These are just a few of the questions discussed at this year’s annual MERLOT Conference in Minneapolis, which I’m attending this week, as blogs continue to change the ways in which we read and write.

As I mentioned in my previous post, MERLOT stands for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. The organization helps college professors and instructors incorporate new technologies in their online and onground classes in a variety of ways. It serves as a clearing house for technology-related learning objects and resources. It publishes JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching). It holds annual conferences that bring together educational technologists from around the world.

Blogs continue to change the academic landscape. An increasing number of college professors and instructors require students to blog as class assignments. Academics, in general, are increasingly using blogs to convey significant course and research material. Professors can lecture on blogs, for example, and then open up the discussion to their students.

One session at MERLOT this year was titled “Using Blogs to Enhance Course Writing Activities.” The presenter, Nima Salehi, talked about ongoing blogging projects in the classroom.

Students in one class were given a set of assignment directions that included this statement about netiquette: “All comments posted to blogs should remain polite, analytical and free of comments that might be construed as negative personal attacks. Disagreement with ideas in reviews should be presented within that context and supported by referencing other materials or examples.”

Wouldn’t it be great if we could get people within the political blogosphere to follow this basic netiquette?

I often use blogging both to lecture and as a class assignment in my online courses. The question I find most pressing is how you focus student blogs on course content. Many students coming to college think of blogs as personal diaries. But personal blogging is just one aspect of the blogosphere, which increasingly is home to a substantial academic discourse.

This leads to another pressing question. How do we archive the best blogs in academia and our current culture for future generations? I have had some interesting discussions about this issue with online instructors, librarians and information technologists at the conference this week. Many academics with an interest in technology still find there is a bias against blogs, but that is quickly changing.

So how do we sort through and archive the massive amount of material now produced by blogs? What blogs should be archived? Who decides what is important?

There are no easy answers to these questions, but this much is clear: Academic blogs and other intellectual web-based material is changing the way we understand and communicate knowledge.