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: