...before the ink is dry

Had a great conversation at lunch today with Peps McCrea over at the University of Brighton. We were talking about our common interest in the educational benefits of blogging, and I made a suggestion that digital identity was a significant factor in the way teachers and other professionals use it (I will blog on this idea in a future post). I expanded by talking about my own use of blogging. I had to examine my own motives which I have already reflected on in previous posts such as Why do I bother? So what are my reasons for expending so much of my time on blogging?

Essentially, I blog not just because I want my ideas to be shared as quickly as possible, but also to receive feedback in the form of discussion. Journal articles take so long to publish, they are often out of date long before the ink is dry. This is because they go through a process of peer review and revision, and then they can hit a brickwall if the journal has a significant backlog of accepted papers, and a page count limit (which most do). I know that peer reviewed academic journals are the lifeblood of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) which comes around every few years (and by which all participating universities are judged on the quality of their research outputs, and subsequently awarded money for more research). I know that great store is placed on high impact journals in th REF and there is always a mad scramble at this time in the cycle, where everyone is submitting articles in the hope they will be published before the deadline. But how much value is there really to be had in publishing articles in high impact, double blind, peer reviewed academic journals beyond the REF? You have to be in it to win it, but the general rule of thumb is that the best research institutes scoop up the lion's share of the cash each time, and the rest are left to grab for the crumbs. An enormous amount of energy and time is taken up during the submission process, often with little or no reward to show at the end.

Here's something else to consider: How many people actually read your journal article when it's finally published, either in paper format or on the journal's webpages? The journals we are talking about here are almost all paywall journals - if your institution doesn't have a subscription and you are not in the mega-rich academic club (and let's face it, who is?) then you are unlikely to be able to read it, and neither are many others. Will publishing in a high impact journal ensure that you are promoted? Possibly, but not probably, as many academics have discovered. How about some monetary reward? Not a hope of that, sunshine - the publishers have tied that one up at both ends. In some business models, they even get you to pay for the priviledge of publishing in their journal. Nice trick if you can do it. If I was to be cynical, I might suggest that the publishing houses have conspired to convince academics that they should spend inordinate amounts of their time dreaming up research ideas, running their experiments and studies, and sweating and toiling over the write up of the research, before giving it away for free so that the publisher can then make a lot of money out of it.

For me, and for an increasing number of fellow academics, publishing in traditional journals is becoming increasingly anacronistic in the digital age of social media communication. We can be our own publishers now. We can build up audiences and loyal followings that are larger than most journals and publishing houses could ever boast. For me, blogging is now the first place I consider when I want to disseminate my ideas quickly, directly to my own community of practice, and in a form that is considered relevant and accessible to those who are engaged in that particular sphere of activity. Blogging is freely accessible, and it is usually concise enough to be assimilated in a few minutes.

Please don't misundertand me - I am not totally dismissing the place of the academic peer reviewed journal. Heavens, I'm an editor of a major learning technology journal, and if I believed they were totally irrelevant, I would resign immediately. No, journals still have their place. What I am arguing here is that the blog is a more rapid, concise and appropriate medium to disseminate important ideas, and it is also a better environment within which to engage critically with colleagues to discuss, argue and otherwise develop a discourse around the subjects in question. I have seen some journals attempting dialogue between protagonists occasionally, but often the result is a stilted, and seemingly contrived dialogue which is somewhat divorced from real-time, real-world conversations. How is the blog different? For me, the blog is an interactive record of ideas; an open archive of opposing viewpoints; a meeting place for live discussion; a repository of thoughts; a testing ground; a launching pad; a dynamic environment within which disagreement can sit comfortably with accord; a fertile ground for the planting and growing of disparate content.

Image source by Hakan Dahlstrom


...before the ink is dry by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.