Blogging About Educational Technology

A Discussion for Current and Prospective Bloggers

Kenneth C. Green – The Campus Computing Project, Scott Jaschik – Inside Higher Ed, Joshua Kim – Dartmouth College,  Eric Stoller – Inside Higher Ed

Joshua: Blogging enables you to get ideas out there fast and get good comments back – benefits of crowdsourcing your ideas. Talking to each other in an agile way is important when working with new technology.

Sometimes worry about way ideas will be perceived particularly if you are not a tenure track professor. Need to understand more of the risks of blogging. Blog a lot of questions and so use those to formulate blog, but sometimes worries that questions might alienate people but questions need to be asked and often sign of own passion and caring about a subject.

Blogging about tech companies, gives companies a voice to share experiences and build relationships with them, see if that technology could work for your institution or not.

Kenneth: Blogging gives you more freedom – can blog regularly or just when have ideas. Digital Tweed blog from Inside Higher. Higher responsibility to get the facts right. No traditional editing so don’t get that feedback.  Use google searches to get ideas. Michael Felstein is good blog to follow from technology perspective.

Eric: Use RWW, twitter a lot as it is a good source of ideas etc. Technology blogs are also a great place for professional development, community building and networking. Try to bring as much transparency as possible. Good content rises to top no matter what.

Blogging gives voice to people who would not usually have a channel.

Bloggers are thoughtful, but often comments are not. Hard if people comment anonymously often as then can’t enter a dialogue with them.  If you blog with your own names then you can build a community and dialogue with each other.

Official voices in HE are often too cautious, not provocative enough.