Applying Teaching Experience to Academic and Scientific Blogging
Many academics and scientists who would like to jump on the blogging bandwagon and share their research with a wider online audience choose not to do so because they do not feel they have the skills required to produce successful blog articles. The fact is, however, that most scholars do indeed possess both the skills and the experience needed to step into blogging with confidence. They conduct advanced research, so they have interesting information to share; they are professional authors, so they know how to communicate effectively in text; and they are usually instructors, so they are adept at conveying new and complicated material to people who are eager to learn. Whereas doing research and publishing text are often noted as useful skills when it comes to blogging, teaching is rarely aligned with the creation of online articles, so a little reflection on the ways in which instructional experience can be applied to scholarly blogging might prove useful.
• Relating vital information in a story format is a tried-and-true method in the classroom. Many instructors use it frequently because it engages and holds the interest of students who possess widely varying knowledge bases and can be an effective approach for teaching many different kinds of material. The same holds true of writing for a broad audience online. Each blog article can be a story in itself, perhaps focussing on an intriguing method or an especially exciting result, and when a scholar posts blogs regularly, a longer story about his or her research activities and discoveries over an extended period of time is created. Readers who enjoy one article will often return to the site to find out how the plot will progress in the next one.
• Explaining ideas more than defending them is a normal stance for the classroom. This can differ markedly from the formal academic and scientific writing found in scholarly books and articles, where ideas, methods and arguments are often developed by altering or contradicting what has gone before, and defending innovative approaches and conclusions is therefore a standard approach. Certainly, a more defensive stance can be adopted when blogging, but for the most part explaining the research, its procedures and its results as clearly as possible is the primary goal.
• Scholars who have spent a lot of time teaching are well aware of the power of specific examples, information-packed visual tools and hands-on activities for communicating material that may be potentially dull or simply too complicated to teach in more general or theoretical ways. Hands-on activities might prove impossible online, but focussing on the high points of the research to share fascinating examples and providing readers with photos, drawings, graphs, charts, maps and the like can clarify many aspects of a research project and engage the interest of those who learn most efficiently through visual means.
• The syllabus or outline handed round in the first session of a course will often include a list of course objectives as well as an outline of the material to be covered in the course. Since online readers tend to expect, usually in the very first sentences, a clear statement of what a blog article contains and why it is worth reading, using the course syllabus model of informing your audience immediately about the content of your article and the reason (or reasons) why it is interesting and valuable can be a useful strategy.
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