Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Peps Mccrea
about how blogging has changed how and who you read. You wonder if this is what they
mean by an ‘online community’.
You find yourself not only questioning academic reporting, but learning in the digital age.
You find yourself equipped with a new vocabulary. You use #hashtags with fluency. You
feel an affinity with Connectivism. You think about the idea of learning existing within
technology. You think about how much you think.
You think about increasing economic pressures and the marketisation of Higher
Education. You think about digital literacy and digital collaboration. You think about your
colleagues who are still living in the unblended world. You begin to see yourself
differently. You wonder about the future. You wonder about how you can contribute
more.
You find yourself wondering about institutional practices. About informal learning. And
about education. Again, and again and again. You are engaged. You are exposed. You
are networked. You are learning.
4. Networked
My third suggestion is that due to its lack of geographical and chronological limitations, open access
to people with similar interests, and ease of making and breaking ties, academic blogging allows you
to become part of a personalised network. There are advantages to this, including rapid access to a
vast range of resources and expertise - I had over 10 responses from Professors and Technologists
in the hours after posting this draft narrative on my blog (Mccrea 2011).
Kjellberg (2010) asks whether the most significant benefit is the feeling of being part of something
bigger: the opportunity to connect to a specific context. However, I wonder if its homophilic
affordances could also be social media's greatest weakness, through diminished social diversity.
5. Conclusion
In conclusion, I suggest that the combination of these affordances offers a potentially rich and
transformative vehicle for academic professional development. It allows individuals to make sense of
the increasingly blurred boundaries between online and offline, between formal and informal, between
traditional and open scholarship (Pachler and Daly 2009). However, this comes with an investment in
time that not all will be comfortable with.
At an institutional level social media deserves serious attention - due to its non-hierarchical
configuration (Siemens and Weller 2011) it has the potential to create a self-organising, highly
responsive and digitally reflexive staff, for a relatively low cost, albeit with a new set of complications,
as academic thinking and practice stray further into public transparency. As Kirkup (2010) argues: if
institutions refuse to accept blogging as a form of scholarly activity then academics will struggle to
position themselves as public intellectuals in the digital age.
References
Davies, J and Merchant, G (2007). Looking from the inside out: academic blogging as new literacy. Lankshear,
C and Knobel, M (eds.) A new literacies sampler. New York, Peter Lang, 167-19
Hayler, M (2010) Autoethnography: making memory methodology. Research in Education (R.Ed), 3(1), 5-9
Kirkup, G (2010) Academic blogging: academic practice and academic identity. London Review of Education,
8(1), 75-84
Kjellberg S (2010) I am a blogging researcher: Motivations for blogging in a scholarly context. First Monday,
15(8)
Mackey, J and Evans, T (2011) Interconnecting networks of practice for professional learning. International
Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(3), 1-18
Mccrea, P (2011) Unconventional approach to a paper about blogging. Learnerosity [Blog],
[accessed 01/06/11]
OLTF (2011) Collaborate to compete: seizing the opportunity of online learning for UK higher
education. Online [accessed 06/03/11]
Pachler, N and Daly, C (2009) Narrative and learning with Web 2.0 technologies: towards a research agenda.
Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25(1). p 6-18
Siemens, G and Weller, M (2011) Higher education and the promises and perils of social networks. Revista de
Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento (RUSC), 8(1), 164–17
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