They're not personal diaries, but they're not your traditional scholarly publications either. The online blog is rapidly emerging as a convenient method of communication, and several Tufts professors and other faculty members are finding that blogging allows them to supplement their research and to expand on topics that they cover in the classroom.
Professors often tie their online posts to the subjects they teach. Assistant Professor of Psychology Sam Sommers keeps a blog called Science of Small Talk on PsychologyToday.com, which contacted him in the summer of 2008 about writing for their Web site.
"My research and teaching focus on the factors that influence everyday thought and behavior, and so the blog essentially does that," Sommers, a social psychologist, said. "It applies scientific theory and findings to real world interaction and also offers more informal analyses of those things."
Sommers' blog analyzes teaching, current events and trends "from the perspective of someone who studies the science of daily behavior and cognition." He recently addressed such subjects as the fall election and a murder trial in Cape Cod on which he served as an expert witness.
Parke Wilde, an associate professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, regularly contributes to a blog called U.S. Food Policy: A Public Interest Perspective.
The blog debuted in December 2004 after Wilde's first semester teaching U.S. food policy at Tufts. Wilde wrote for a newsletter called Nutrition Week in Washington from 1990 to 1992, which covered many of the same topics that the U.S. Food Policy blog does.
"I hadn't been able to write … this mix of news and opinion and short pieces the way I had for the newsletter during all my years in graduate school and then five years working for [the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)]. It was great fun returning to it," Wilde said.
Although the blog occasionally advocates for change in U.S. food policy, Wilde said that his priority is making nutrition information accessible. "There [are] … people even heavier on the change part than I am," he said. "I spend a lot of time thinking about what can I say to clear up for laypeople how U.S. food policy actually works."
Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), finds blogging to be an excellent way to supplement his academic writing. CIRCLE, part of the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, researches the civic and political engagement of Americans between the ages of 15 and 25, according to its Web site.
"I like to think that my organization and myself are part of a movement for civic renewal in America," Levine said. "We're more the research part of that … The blog is more professional than personal, but not necessarily academic, because my profession kind of straddles the line from the academy out. I don't think too many of my readers are professors. A lot of them are going to be activists."
Frequently, the readership of faculty's online posts is as varied as the subjects themselves.
Although Levine knows how many people read his blog, he doesn't know what the makeup of his readership is.
"I do know that a substantial number of my closest collaborators around the country read it, so it's a way of reaching them without spamming them with daily e-mails," he said. "It's up to them whether they want to read it."
Similarly, Sommers is "blissfully ignorant" as to who looks at his online posts.
"Once in a while I hear from students who are reading it … I get random e-mails from faculty or journalists or just people elsewhere, who for whatever reason, happen upon it," he said. "So it's sort of a mixed bag."
Keeping his varied readership in mind, Sommers admitted that the public nature of blogging occasionally limits what he feels he can say. "I certainly am cognizant of the fact that anyone in the world can read [my blog], so anything that I wouldn't want a current student or colleague to know about me, or for that matter, a perfect stranger from across the world, I wouldn't put in there," he said. "Even though it does draw on personal experience and personal observations as well, it's not a ‘here's what I did today' kind of blog."
Wilde has found blogging to be a great way for him to connect with students. "Many students and former students send me links to their current work, which I often promote through a post," he said a follow-up e-mail to the Daily.
Although blogging is an inherently casual method of communication, most faculty members find that they usually stick to a regular schedule.
Wilde said that he spends about five hours a week working on his posts, but it's not all work and no play. "About half of that time is reading that I can chalk up to professional development. Perhaps two or three hours a week is just for the fun of it," he said.
Psychology Today asked Sommers to publish once every two weeks, a constant deadline that Sommers said has not presented a major problem. "There are times during the semester where that's about all I can do, and sometimes in the summer and less busy times I can [write the blog] a bit more often," he said.
Levine updates his blog every weekday and has done so since 2003. He said that blogging itself does not take up too much of his time because much of the material is shared with other things he writes.
"There's a lot of overlap. It works two ways — if I'm writing an academic piece … I will usually put pieces of it on the blog, almost like a notebook, and, on the other hand, on quite a few occasions, I've written something for the blog and somebody asks me expand it for an article," he said.
Levine finds some aspects of blogging to be quite liberating compared with traditional academic writing. "The blog is wonderfully quick and is flexible in form, and you can write just two paragraphs, because no journal is going to publish two paragraphs on [their own]. Some scholarly journals will take years to go though the publication cycle, so you write some thing about the 2008 election and it comes out in 2012," Levine said.
Despite the benefits of blogging, though, Levine believes that it cannot replace many aspects of academic writing. "There's a great need for the peer-reviewed and more thoughtful and carefully documented writing," he said. "I can imagine for other reasons, mainly financial reasons, that [some of] the current scholarly journals will disappear, but I don't think [they] will be replaced by just short, self-published pieces. That would be a big loss."
There is also risk of over-saturation of the blogosphere, according to Sommers. "At this point in time it's more of a badge of honor or it's [more] unique to not have a blog than it is to have a blog," he said. "Who knows what the future will hold. How many blogs can really be sustained?"
