I finally got around to reading “Uses of Blogs” today, a book I picked up at the AOIR conference in Brisbane back in September 2006. I should have read this book sooner; it was a relevant and stimulating treatment of blogging.

I found the chapters on blogging in PR and academia most interesting (go figure). A couple weeks ago, I started a sort of apprenticeship with an Austin-based web marketing consultant. So far, I’ve learned a lot about marketing and public relations online. I’m more interested in the PR aspects of this kind of work, but it’s great to learn about the marketing side of things, too. Anyway, I’m coming to realize the importance of good content to a successful marketing and PR effort. Trevor Cook’s chapter about PR emphasizes this point.

In his chapter, Cook also discusses the always on, conversational nature of PR online. Blogs play an important role in the “dialogue” of contemporary public relations by allowing practitioners to interact with publics in a real-time, one-to-one, permanent space. Blogs allow practitioners to create relationships with individuals and not just broadcast dumbed-down messages to mass audiences. Lots of good stuff in that chapter, and I will definitely be coming back to some of these ideas.

The chapters about blogging in academia focused on issues of collaboration and intellectual discourse, transparency and hierarchy. Specifically, Jill Walker’s chapter about blogging inside the ivory tower focuses on issues related to a scholar’s position in the academic hierarchy and her online interactions. Interestingly, Walker thinks grad students are in the best position to blog openly (and under their real names) about both the academic process and the content they study. I don’t disagree with that; I certainly have used this blog for exploring a range of topics, including research ideas, the process of earning a Ph.D., personal interests, etc… It does seem like the various responsibilities of a faculty or administrative position could dampen an individual’s desire to be completely free and open with blog content. As a student, however, I don’t really feel that pressure. I certainly don’t feel like my blog will negatively impact my dissertation process or job prospects. I guess we’ll see about that soon enough…

Overall, this book was a pretty quick read, and some of the chapters were more relevant to me than others. But it got me thinking in different ways about issues I think a lot about already.

I’m a bit late to this story, but I still want to talk about it. Last month at the University of Chicago Law School, administrators turned off internet access to classrooms. The dean of the law school first wrote in his email to students, “I therefore ask, respectfully but emphatically, that you use computers in class only for class-related purposes.” Then he told them the university shut off internet access in classrooms, just to be sure.

I feel the need to take a stand on this issue. I teach college courses at the University of Texas at Austin (and at North Carolina State University before that), and yes, there are students in my classroom who use their laptops. And I am sure many of them are on Facebook and Gmail or shoe shopping or IMing friends or whatever. But I’m also sure that some of them are doing productive things related to classwork.

I can’t count the number of times we’ve been talking about something and I can’t remember an exact date or statistic and one of my students has quickly looked it up. When all students can connect to the internet, our classrooms become interactive spaces for learning, where we can pull in information from that wonderful world wide web to help us delve more deeply into an issue. It’s a great feeling, knowing that we can find anything we want to help us learn more about a topic, knowing that we don’t have to depend solely on the textbook and my knowledge of a topic.

And so what if some students are using Facebook in class? I’ve been a student myself and there are days when class was boring or redundant or just not on the top of my list. Why can’t I use my time in a way I prefer? It can be disrespectful or rude, but it also is just part of life in the classroom. Students are going to do it, no matter how many rules and suggestions we make to the contrary.

As an instructor, I’ve learned there are a few things I can do to address this issue:

1. I can ignore it, just like we ignore so many things students do in the classroom.
2. I can call out students who are doing it; I’ve found that embarrassing them a little works well.
3. I can make my classroom a more interesting place where students are engaged and don’t want to be on Facebook.

If students have a choice in terms of what they pay attention to, of course they’re going to choose the thing that’s more interesting and useful. If I’m just droning on about material that’s covered in their textbook, why do they need to listen to me? I need to go beyond textbooks and boring lectures, and create an interactive and valuable learning environment. When I do that, students are actively involved in class and not doing other things.

With internet access, students can upload notes to their wikis and webspaces, look up definitions for new terms, IM each other to clarify questions. There are myriad practical, productive uses for the internet in the classroom, and simply shutting off access because of the potential distractions seems like the wrong way to address these issues.

At a recent kickball (yep, kickball) game with some fellow grad students, the topic of academic transparency came up. We’ve been talking for a while about the benefits of sharing information about our successes and failures with each other, specifically as they relate to the publication and grant processes. It is incredibly valuable to learn from others’ experiences with what works (and what doesn’t) in getting articles published in highly respected academic journals, for example. However, as expected, several people expressed concerned with issues of privacy, theft, and reputation.

Academics are notoriously protective of their ideas; in an industry where publishing lots of good ideas on a regular basis means job security and the esteem of your peers, of course you’re going to protect your best ideas. You don’t want someone else publishing your ideas before you can. However, I think there’s an important distinction between keeping your ideas quiet and keeping your process quiet.

We can learn a great deal from talking to others about their experiences. With the publishing example in particular, if I couldn’t talk to other students and faculty who had submitted articles before, I would have no idea where to start or what to do. And part of that means sharing failures and mistakes, not just successes.

But this is where many people resist. No one wants to talk about their failures. Even though we live in a culture that is relatively accepting of failure, we’re still quite tight lipped about our personal failures. People are often reluctant to share these experiences.  Why is this?  Are we afraid of looking bad in front of others?  Stupid?  Naive?  Less competitive? Maybe we’re worried that one day this information will come back to us in some unfortunate way, that it may damage us professionally.

But will being open about our failures actually hurt us?  It seems to me that everyone fails at some point in their lives, many of us do it all the time!  Maybe being open and discussing these failures with others will help us learn from our mistakes and feel better about ourselves, a sort of failure therapy. And in the process, others will learn from these mistakes and not have to experience them themselves. It seems win-win.  So why are we so reluctant to participate in these kinds of conversations?