Exploring Blogland

Find out about John Dearn

By John Dearn, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic)

May 17, 2005: Blogs (Web logs for the uninitiated) would have to be one of the ugliest terms to have emerged in recent years. However, there is no denying their fascination, from the perspective of both the blogger and the reader (surely not bloggee!).

There seem to be blogs out there in cyberspace for almost everything you can imagine - and sometimes more than you would want to imagine!

Buried in blogland, though, are some real gems. Take Pedablogue, a blog site maintained by Professor Michael Arnzen at Seton Hill University since 2003 - a site devoted to "A Personal Inquiry into the Scholarship of Teaching". Educational blogs don't appear to be that unusual; there is even an educational bloggers network.

On Mike Arnzen's site, you will come across a fascinating little guide to time savers for academic staff, which he prepared for a forum at his university. There are plenty of people who will tell you that time pressure is the biggest problem facing academic staff these days, and let's face it, academics are not the most efficient organisers of time in the world.

Mike Arnzen has 47 tips organised under the headings "teaching", "scholarship" and "service". Too many to list here but a few examples will suffice.

Teaching

•  Don't over-prepare. There's only so much material you can fit into an hour-long class. And if you're prep-to-teach ratio is 8 hours for every 1 hour of class (not including grading and other matters), then perhaps you're overdoing it. Trust your knowledge base and ability to work "off the cuff" if you run out of material during class. Remember that the students need to do their own intellectual work...plan to give them the opportunity.

Scholarship

•  Write what you know. Teaching a new course in Egyptology, based on your recent trip to Egypt? Write a paper about hieroglyphics for the Journal of Egyptology. Write an article for the alumnae magazine about your trip. Present a paper about your teaching experience at a conference. Write a teacher's guide to accompany your new textbook. Turn your inventive syllabus into a book outline.

Service

•  Establish clear boundaries with students. Close the office door when your open office hours aren't in session if you need to get things done. Set rules regarding your willingness to work via e-mail or other methods. Be accessible, but respect your own need for time to administer other tasks.

And the time you have saved after putting all these ideas into practice will provide the opportunity to explore the rest of his fascinating site.

Previous columns

Learning as self-authorship

Writing to learn

Sustaining a scholarly approach to teaching

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Last Updated on August 1, 2005