Great reflection from @deandad on why he started blogging about higher ed admin work and how he uses blogging to work through his ideas. insidehighered.com/blogs/confessi…
I've come to use blogging for similar purposes and find it vital to my work. My most recent books wouldn't exist without me blogging @insidehighered, but truth be told, I started blogging because I was adjuncting and I needed the money. I had no natural impulse towards it.
Having experienced the benefits of blogging, I wish I'd understood the purpose and function that @deandad talks about before I started the work, but I didn't. I do recommend to others that if you can find a way to make blogging work for you, you should give it a try.
Problem, as with everything in higher ed, is resources and time. I prioritized (and continue to prioritize) blogging because I'm paid for it and it now delivers ancillary benefits in terms of building my position in an education ecosystem where I'm institutionally unaffiliated.
Contingent faculty aren't going to blog their way out of their contingency. I'll say it again. I started blogging for the money. That I've been able to forge a post-ac path that seems to hold some promise is 100% due to me landing under the umbrella of a publication that pays.
It drives me batty when people point at contingent faculty and say that they need to be creative, or worse "entrepreneurial" in order to improve their positions. "Try blogging!" Such B.S. Make sustainable positions where people have time to reflect and write to improve their work
It makes me extra batty when people point at those who have made something work post-ac and say, "See! Anyone can do it!" Of course it happens, but as some sort of widespread solution to the structural problems, it's more B.S. dodging the real underlying issues.
Blogging is 100% worth doing, and I want a world where all faculty are empowered to writer about their work and benefit from it, but blogs ain't going to save anyone by themselves.
Well, that went somewhere different than I thought. I suppose this thread can exist as a model for blogging, starting with one idea and seeing where it leads. More evidence for the approach Matt espouses in the great piece all the way at the top.
When they start blogging, I also encourage faculty to let go of notions of polish and perfection in what they post, kind of like me not seeing "writer" in the tweet above when I clearly meant "write."
