Blogging- My Ideas and Murmurs get some inspiration

For our class we have been using our blogs to share our ideas and test out our identities as bloggers. I have found the space an outlet to create and form my ideas around things I think about sitting in class or in my day-to-day existence here at UBC. Blogging has been a process where I can now quite comfortably dip one toe into the pond. You see my old method for testing ideas is a folder on my desktop called “ideas and murmurs”. As I wrote this post I clicked back into this space and found ideas that I had started but never finished. Emotions I had felt but never expressed publicly. Maybe for me these will one day turn into blog posts but for now lay in an incubator on my desktop.

“So why do I blog? Why should I continue to blog after this course? How does blogging fit within the UBC landscape in terms of future employment, tenure and promotion or does that even matter?”

Blogging as Professional Development
One way to think about this further is to look at blogging as professional development. By framing it in this way one might think “Well it is an investment that ultimately will make me better at what I do. Isn’t it?”

In a 2013 study titled, Content Analysis Study of Librarian Blogs: Professional Development and Other Uses scholar Grace.M Jackson Brown determined that professional development was one of the major focuses of the blog content that she analysed. So I guess that librarians are keen to share, discuss and connect through their blogs as a way to develop as professionals in the field.

This is exactly what one of the author’s of a collective of academic bloggers from Tenure She Wrote reflects on in her article Social Media as Professional Development. One of the benefits of being active on social media for this author is the role that it played in mentoring her to be ahead of the game as a junior faculty member. Her colleagues would ask her how she was so in the know when it came to granting, publication and other hoops that academics are asked to jump through to prove their worth in the whole tenure and promotion circus.

In her post she discretely credited her time spent on social media reading blogs that served as opportunities to connect with leaders and mentors in her field. Blogs for her, provided access to knowledge holders that many junior faulty do not have the ability to connect with. Being savvy on social media while rocking a pseudonym was a way for this author to function within academia, which can be a highly stressful, isolated and judgemental space.

Blogging and Academia
The issue of blogging and academia has also been explored by a colleague and friend of mine Dave Gaertner who has embraced blogging as part of his own practice as a scholar because of the power blogging has given him to strengthen his voice, facilitate revisions of his work and cultivate scholarly relationships.

In his article To Blog, or not to Blog: Social Media as Academic Practice Dave writes that he started his blog Novel Alliances because he was frustrated with his writing and the graveyard of written work that he created that was decaying on his desktop( I hear you there Dave!)

On the topic of tenure and blogging Dave shares his views on this by saying

“Debates over “blogging for tenure” are obfuscating the ways in which social media works to revitalize stagnant pieces of writing while generating serious opportunities for book chapters and peer-reviewed articles—which, along with the monograph, remain the holy grails of the would be tenured."

What both Gaertner and the authors of Tenure She Wrote reflect on in their work is the research value of blogging as well as the space that it creates for them to grow and develop as academics. Whether you may see blogging as having direct value associated with your research or a space for professional growth I can see blogging as having personal, professional and academic value.

One of the other ways that I see blogging of value is the community it builds and holds us accountable to. In this process we grow, our ideas shape and shift and we gain strength in knowing that our words can make a difference.

I want to share two examples of fierce Indigenous women indeed making a difference through the blog-sphere. Adrienne Keene, author and creator of Native Appropriations and Dr. Jessica R. Metcalfe creator of Beyond Buckskin.

Both of them recently spoke at the Indigenous New Media Symposium in NYC. This symposium was an opportunity for those working in the field of media studies to hear a bit more about emerging scholars work in the field of Indigenous New Media.

Blogging as Community Contributions and Responsibility

Dr. Metcalfe connects her work on her blog to her community responsibility. In a recent post she reflected on her experience at the symposium:

“In traditional teachings, we are taught that everyone in the community has something valuable to contribute, something that is necessary for the community. Because of these reasons, we must always acknowledge that we have an obligation to the communities we serve.”

I can see how she embodies this value in her work and in the blog that she has created. You can see that she connects with, provides mentorship and showcases Indigenous artists work through her blog that now functions as both a boutique and a space “providing an in depth podium for societal participation.”

Blogging for Change
In her blog Native Appropriations, Adrienne Keene started to use this space as a way to archive problematic images she came across that grossly and inaccurately misrepresented Indigenous peoples. In her talk at the Indigenous New Media Symposium she explains that her blog was initially created to “catalogue misrepresentations” and later became a space where she could process this information, write her thoughts about it and respond to these images and the companies that presented them.

As a result of the blog the online community has grown to over 40,000. Her work is featured on a number of sites that are personal fave’s of mine such as Racialicious, Sociological Images, Bitch Magazine and Indian Country Today.

As I listened to these stories and read a bit about the research of how and why each of these individuals and other librarians blogged I feel connected to their purpose and growth that they encountered through the humble beginnings of their creative, community orientated, professional and academic spaces. These honest reflections  have inspired me to keep on blogging as a way to eventually move those ideas and murmurs off of my desktop and into something that can be shared and can grow.