In this guest blog, as part of our WriteFest month, Dr Jenny Scoles discusses academic blogging, its impact and the University of Edinburgh’s Learning and Teaching blog – Teaching Matters. Dr Jenny Scoles is the editor of Teaching Matters and an Academic Developer (Learning and Teaching Enhancement) in the Institute for Academic Development, and provides pedagogical support for University course and programme design. Her interests include student engagement, professional learning and sociomaterial methodologies.
“How can I find my own voice in my academic writing?” This was a question I struggled to address in my first few years of PhD thesis writing. It started because I was genuinely afraid of the theory that I was using to underpin my thesis. I felt I wasn’t qualified to use these highly esoteric, philosophical concepts because I didn’t know how to twist and shape them to match my view of the world. So, I wrote at a distance, keeping the theoretical discussion in my thesis as if it were still written in the voices and words of previous authors. Unconvinced, my supervisor asked, where was I in the thesis?
I decided I needed another method to free-up my writing style; one that would let me play with concepts, metaphors, and definitions, without the fear of my output being ‘judged’ as an assessed artefact (e.g., a thesis chapter draft). I turned to academic blogging. And it felt like such a breath of fresh air.
What is academic blogging?
Academic blogging (see Mewburn & Thomson, 2013) has been around for decades, and is based on using an online platform for communicating academic ideas or concepts in broad, general terms. I understand it as differing from traditional academic outputs, such as peer-reviewed journal articles, in a number of ways:
- Conversational and informal in tone and style.
- Limited word count, normally 400-900 words
- Encouraged use of first-person pronoun ‘I’.
- Discouraged use of jargon, acronyms or academese.
- Limited citations and references.
- Not peer-reviewed, but often has an editor, especially if its is a multi-authored blog.
- Often uses free software and linked to social media accounts for promotion.
- Much quicker submission to publication timeline.
- An assumed intelligent lay audience (not discipline-specific).
In my first foray into academic blogging, I created a free WordPress site so that I could publish posts publicly online. Knowing I had an audience ‘out there’ meant that there was still a performative element to my writing, but one that I owned and directed; not my supervisor or examiners. I could talk to my faceless readers through my decisions, use the first person ‘I’, and openly address my emotional responses to the PhD journey. Bringing myself into my writing meant that I could close the distance between me and the scary theory, explaining why some aspects of it worked for me, and why others didn’t. And I ended-up using this more personal style in my actual thesis.
A multi-authored blog: Teaching Matters
Fast-forward to my current role as Academic Developer, with one of my main tasks being Chief Editor of the University of Edinburgh’s Learning and Teaching blog – Teaching Matters. Established in 2016 by Senior Management, the blog aims to provide a space for teaching and learning practices to be shared, discussed, debated but, more importantly, valued in the University. Staff and students can publish their learning and teaching practice on the blog, using different writing styles, such as reflection, dialogue, critique, or description. With over 4 million page views since its inception, we know there is a wide, international audience engaging with the content.
I took over running Teaching Matters in 2018, and it quite literally has become my baby. I say this because it requires constant and careful nurturing, care and sustenance to keep it maintained and ‘alive’, but also it is my parental duty to see it grow and develop – in both reputation and impact.
At first, I was obsessed with checking the WordPress statistics to see how many people were engaging with it – how many people had viewed Teaching Matters today? Did I beat the viewing stats for the previous month? As time went on, I began to realise that these crude statistics weren’t telling me how readers were engaging with the work published on Teaching Matters, nor what impact this writing process had on the contributors themselves. I was hearing more and more anecdotes and stories about unexpected opportunities that had transpired for contributors since publishing their work on Teaching Matters, as well as how the writing process itself had an impact on them as individuals. I realised my interest about engagement, reputation and impact should shift to a qualitative and nuanced enquiry that values process, relationships, and connections over a narrow focus on numerical statistics as a proxy for engagement and impact.
This shift in my focus on academic blogging led me to undertake a large PTAS-funded research project surveying 150 contributors and readers, and interviewing a further 22, exploring themes such as conversations, sharing practice and impact. The findings were fascinating and heart-warming. One area that emerged of particular interest was contributors’ unexpected benefits of academic blogging and a re-imagining of what ‘impact’ could look like. These included:
- Invitations to collaborate on papers, books, projects
- Invitations to be a speaker or keynote
- Generating connections
- Raising academic profile (externally)
- Serving as record of professional development or promotional evidence
- Gaining a new skill – many academics find academic blogging quite a challenge!
- Increasing your visible presence, e.g., exposure to senior management
- Pleasure in raising awareness of a new practice
- Sense of achievement/recognition
- A cathartic, and ENJOYABLE, writing experience
I highly encourage any staff or students to give blogging a go, and, if you want an international audience, please think about publishing on Teaching Matters – the article just has to relate to any aspect of learning and teaching. Posts on tutoring and demonstrating, for example, would be of interest to a large majority of our audience. If you are interested, do please get in touch with the editorial team at teachingmatters@ed.ac.uk, view the writing and style guidelines, or submit a post directly here: Submit a post.
References
Mewburn, I., & Thomson, P. (2013). Why do academics blog? An analysis of audiences, purposes and challenges. Studies in Higher Education, 38(8), 1105–1119. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2013.835624
WriteFest is running at the University of Edinburgh during November, visit our webpages to find out more: WriteFest 2024
