One of my favorite new blogs to read is Prof. Hacker. They take such a no nonsense approach to technology and productivity in higher education.
Most recently, they wrote a post about blogging and tenure: specifically talking about your blogging efforts in your tenure notebook. The author of the post included the paragraph he included in his notebook about his blog and said this:
I want to highlight that I did not present my blog as a piece of scholarship. I considered it to be a part of my professional development, meaning it played a vital role in the creation of my scholarship even though it was not scholarship itself.
However, I have seen a number of blogs written by professors (even some here at Baylor) which I would definitely include in the “piece of scholarship” column. The author of the post asks those in the comments to state the ways they wrote or talked about their blog when they went up for tenure, and many of the commenters mention that they do consider their blogs to be serious scholarship.
Perhaps in another post here at InfoSandbox, I will list some of the great blogs I have found that Baylor professors write.
One Comment
I’m glad you found that post valuable! And I should have probably said in the post that I was working with my institution’s definition of scholarship, which emphasizes the peer-review process. Since my blog is not peer-reviewed, it does not fit our definition of scholarship. Each institution has it’s own definition and should be making that clear to tenure-track faculty from the start. At some places, blogs will be scholarship. At some places, they won’t even count as professional development. That’s the kind of conversation we should be having, one about the various definitions and why they exist.
And though I’m in Connecticut, I was raised in Texas and will always be a Texas boy at heart!