How and Why to Create Your Academic Blog

Tara Pina's student blog for Digital Culture

I'm requiring my students to blog as part of this course in Digital Culture. Blogging is a vital new means of communicating today and can be a great part of a learning process. However, a student blog can also be a dead end if it is treated merely as a digital dropbox, or as a way to prove to a teacher that one has done one's homework. 

So I hope to get my students launched well on blogging. First off, it helps to see blogging as one component within what I've called a tiered content model. In short, blogging has a middle position between "teaser content" (more brief, frequent, and active content shared within social media streams like Twitter, Google+, or Facebook) and "formal content" (longer, more final publication of some kind).

A blog is a place to grow and develop ideas that have received social proof when shared in briefer form within a more active (but random) medium like Twitter or Google+.  Blogging allows for exploring ideas at greater length without yet feeling required to make those ideas take a fixed or final form. 

Here's how to set up your student blog:

Welcome to our brave new digital world

This blog is dedicated to exploring digital culture, taking as its premise that our culture has become something distinctly new due to the "technium" -- the set of conditions that include technology, new media, networked communications, and ubiquitous computing.

We've been colonizing this brave new digital world for awhile (or it has colonized us!), but like this early 18th century world map, we are only getting started on labeling the features of this broadened space of activity. There remain parts identified as "unknown." Our digital world may be familiar to us in many respects, but much is foreign. We must set about exploring, mapping, and testing -- measuring the riches and the risks along the way.

"A New Map of the World With Trade Winds" (1732)
CC License, David Rumsey

This map depicts a variety of implements: a crown, a book, tools, weapons -- and like the earlier Europeans we must also make use of the implements we know to make sense of the places we do not know. We face the foreign with the familiar, recognizing that the journey, as we take it, will inevitably change our tools and our maps.

As tools to map and manage our brave new digital world, I offer the following: