Tama’s eLearning Blog

Today’s Higher Education section of The Australian contained some timely thoughts and speculations on the role of blogs in Australian academia. Bernard Lane’s “Blog on and start debate” looks at undergraduate blogs but also looks at academics blogging and mentions that Sydney University has set up a staff blogging platform via which Sydney academics are encouraged to blog in order to engage more widely with those outside of their university (both at other unis and the general public).

Also of interest was Andrew Leigh’s piece “Don’t Miss out on the world library” in which he argues that all academics should be posting their work online in order to ensure their writing spreads as far and wide as possible. Indeed, for those pondering an academic life, this statistic should be all you need to get your own blog and online presence up and running:

A spate of studies has shown that making articles available online boosts citations by 50 to 250 percent. If you want to have your articles cited in other countries and other disciplines, your best bet is to post them on your website.

(There is a slightly longer version of the article on Andrew’s own blog which is worth reading.)

Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning in this context that I’m part of the group helping set up a blogging platform called MyResearchSpace which is run by the Graduate Research School here at the University of Western Australia and will provide a blog, gallery space and 500Mb storage space for any postgraduate student at UWA who wants it. More on that in a future post …