Some interesting thoughts (by a blogger) about why young students and scholars should avoid blogging:
Academic Blogging: Some Reservations and Lessons
It's good advice for those who do blog too. In its immediacy, blogging can inhibit reflection.
Since I am obviously not following Blum's advice to avoid blogging altogether, I may as well mention that (1) Blum doesn't address the public service aspect of scholarship and (2) while I agree that peer review is important, I am more inclined to put whatever "new" ideas I have out there because I think that there is something fundamentally broken about the way the academic publishing system works (more on this, hopefully, another time). Or maybe it's because I see myself as a גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב.
Here is another perspective mentioned in the comments to Blum's post: The Common School.
2 comments:
You both make some good points. For myself, I have two reasons for not blogging:
1. I don't have the time these days.
2. When I have tried my hand at blogging (Amanda asked me to do a psychology of religion series for her blog), I ended up producing five-page documents with thorough research behind them (I didn't want to look like a knucklehead). If I was to produce something like that for a blog on a sorta-daily basis... I should just write a book.
Thanks for the comment, Chuck.
Random thoughts: Time is a big issue if one wishes to produce substantive posts. The instantaneousness of blog "publishing", on the other hand, can be somewhat addictive, and the exploratory nature of blogging means that I don't have to back up everything I say in the way I would if I were trying to publish something in a peer-reviewed venue.
I really enjoyed your psychology of religion series, by the way.
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