Academic blogging on the rise

Term papers and response essays may soon be replaced by syllabi-mandated blog posts and comments, according to a recent article in The New York Times.

Professors in universities across the country have been calling for a radical reworking of the traditional term paper and formal essay structure. In the past few years, blog writing has become a requirement in some literature, business and even engineering courses.

Vanderbilt students may also be aware of the rising trend in blogging as more and more faculty over the years have incorporated blogs or discussion boards for the purpose of posting student responses to reading assignments.

"Students tend to write better when they know someone might actually read what they're doing, other than their professor who has to read it," said Derek Bruff, a senior lecturer in mathematics and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching.

Bruff currently teaches a statistics course and uses a course blog as a medium for posting assignments, quizzes and questions to help guide students through the textbook reading. Students are able to post questions of their own.

"It gives students the opportunity to write and think about the course topics on a more regular basis in something that's not a high stakes graded essay," Bruff said. "It's more about participation and less about valuation. You also sometimes see a bit more creativity with multimedia than you normally would in a more formal medium and I think that's valuable too."

Depending on the course, professors make the blogs private (so that only the professor can view them) or visible to the other students or the entire web.

English professor Humberto Garcia also uses blogging in his courses and he is very much aware of the issue of privacy. While his first-year seminar blog on the study of Islam was available only to the other members of the class, another blog for a course that catered to older students was made visible to the public.

"I want students thinking about how they represent themselves online," said Bruff. "It's a way to help them have a positive and academic digital footprint online. When employers Google them, they won't just find their Facebook profile, they might find something that will even help them get hired."

Bruff cited an instance in which one student was contacted by a researcher he had cited in his footnotes and offered some insightful comments. Another student was excited to find that his paper was the third hit on the Google search engine page of his topic.

"I knew that kind of thing could happen when students make their work public," Bruff said.

According to The New York Times article, while many professors cite that blog writing provides students with a sense of relevancy and instant feedback, others believe that formal papers are necessary to develop students' critical thinking and argumentation.

Nevertheless, formal papers are on the decline. The National Survey of Student Engagement found that in 2011, 82 percent of first-year college students and more than half of seniors weren't asked to do a single paper of 20 pages or more.

Blogging and social media may turn out to be the more successful alternative in the age of social media.

"Academia has always benefited from informal conversation between interested parties," wrote Sarah Russell, a staff writer for the Daily Beacon and history major at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. "It seems only fitting that it should embrace the vehicle of technology to further these conversations."