An interesting article from the “Professor Hacker” column in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about the pros and cons of graduate students building personal websites. Suggested reading for my Eng 110 students for next week.
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I also recommend, probably more highly than this article, a recent series of posts on In the Middle about academic blogging: http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/
That’s a good academic blog to keep an eye on, even if you’re not a medievalist.
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While I appreciate Prof.Hacker’s discussion of the benefits of going digital for the purpose of self-marketing (disseminating your CV, e-portfolio, etc.) and “‘middle-state publishing,’” Prof.Hacker does not meditate enough—in my opinion—on the latter; I am drawn more to Hurley’s consideration of blogging as ‘see[ing] things in the middle” in “Thinking Aloud: Process, Product, and Becoming an Academic” from In the Middle. Blogging, here, becomes the act of “thinking” in itself, as opposed to the documenting of one “having had thought,” and this seems freeing to me as an unpublished graduate student in that it makes publishing more accessible. Yet it also seems frightening to broadcast one’s partial grasp (will I regret this post, itself, later?). But even while I may have cold feet in terms of my own blogging—an anxiety that time and more blogging will eventually dissipate, I’m sure—I look appreciatively toward scholars’ blogs as offering what we can rarely encounter: “the movement from unstructured reflection to drafty attempt at argument to polished chapter, article, or even book” (Hurley). Seeing the bridge between a scholar’s untidy but invigorating [and sadly often unseen] process of thinking and the polished product would be educational in itself.