One of the nicest conferences I’ve recently been to was ODLAA 2005 but not so much for the presentations as the ridiculous number of fascinating people there who not only had interesting things to say, but were all up for saying them until the very early hours. One of them, Terry Anderson, was also good enough to take up my offer of an edublog and today that is the source for one of the most interesting reflections on blogging as a genre in the academic world that I’ve yet to see… Adrian take note!
After posting for four months and with 12 entries on the clock (none of them related to holidays ;) – “Is anyone really interested in seeing flicks and commentary about what a wonderful holiday I had last summer” – Terry runs over ego boosting, immediacy and rewards in some detail commenting that:
The Blog also allows me a venue for rebuttal and engagement with the reader that are perhaps possible but very rarely done directly in academic journals. Thus, feedback and immediacy demonstrates very high relative advantage for Blogs.
However, what of the quality of that feedback? First, one has to discount the plague of spam that seems to be the most popular genre of comment posted to my blog. The responses I get are quite varied and usually consist of short snippets of feedback. Now this lack of detailed response may be due to the somewhat mundane and perhaps pedantic nature of my posts, but I have not gotten the type of in depth feedback I would expect to get from editors and reviewers of a peer reviewed article. More typically other bloggers use a reference to my posting to begin and expand their own thinking. So one can conclude that blogging response is more generative than comprehensive or authoritative.
Anyway, the whole article is well worth a read and added to that the fact that Terry is also the editor of IRRODL makes you wonder if we could see any sort of meeting of the genres anytime soon?