I’ll be meeting with my supervisor tomorrow — in the military’s terms, my “rater” — to review my goals for my first year as an assistant professor. I’ve looked through the institutional examples and documentation on how to do this stuff, on how best to fill out Department of the Army form 7222-1 and what the expectations are in DPOM 5-3 and such, and I’ve drafted bullet points for what I want to accomplish in terms of teaching, scholarship, service, Cadet development, and faculty development. And there’s one goal I’m not sure I want to add to the mix, and it has to do with this weblog.
Steve Krause, Dennis Jerz, and others have offered plenty of useful insights on the intersection between scholars’ online writings and their professional activities. I don’t list my URL here under any heading on my CV, except as part of the address block, next to my email address, and I don’t feel like it would be appropriate for me to do so. At the same time, I think of the great presentation Clancy did at CCCC analyzing a scholarly weblog conversation, and I think of the fact that weblog discussions have led for me to brief pieces published in JAC and Pedagogy, and I think of the ways I’ve tried to re-imagine the ways that such conversations carry heterogeneous value (affective and otherwise) beyond considerations of what they can be exchanged for. All of these are reasons why I might want to suggest on the DA 7222-1 that writing and conversing with other academics regularly (or, ahem, more regularly than I’ve done lately) here helps me be a better faculty member, and that it’s something that I want to continue.
But that’s a goal I can (and do) easily hold privately, without ceding it to the institution. The thing is, with my abiding interest in the intersection of the information economy, affective labor, and the personal, why should I? If my hope is that I might make a difference, however negligibly slight, in what gets valued at an institution as immensely traditional as mine, why not? One obvious reason, of course, is that such thoughts of difference-making are so superabundant among bloggers that they are deservedly mocked as the internet’s most prominent example of masturbatory vanity as cliché. If figuring things out and working through ideas are viewed as pleasurable activities for academics, then doing so on a weblog will always seem to some to be an act of public onanism, and the desire to somehow to associate it with one’s paid work — well, let’s not even go there.
If you are fortunate enough to be able to convince your colleagues and superiors of the value of your blogging, that’s great. If, however, you turn your blog into something that you do just because you filed a document somewhere that made it part of your job description — then it will just become another hoop.
Good point. You’ve talked to me about this before, and I think the key term has always been “value”: can I ask what’s changed and what hasn’t changed (for your colleagues and superiors) about that perception of value?
I take, at least somewhat, the opposite view of what Dennis expresses. You are going to blog, whether you get credit for it or not, so why not get credit for it? Getting credit for it doesn’t make it a hoop to jump in and of itself. Instead, it’s you deciding which hoops you want to jump. It’s an important(?) part of your ethos as writer, professor, teacher and all that. Whether they value it has little bearing, I assume, on what you will or won’t do here.
Should they value blogging as part of your professional ethos, and while you are likely making little change of the earth shattering sort, as your charges go out into the field and see blogs from their superiors or underlings, by making your blog “official,” and should you receive professional credit for it, it makes it harder for the powers that be to dismiss those blogs of men in the field. You just may set precedent for some military blogger down the road.
I don’t know, though you asked Dennis, that my colleagues value my blogging all that much, though I do get “professional improvement units” for it, because I’m a writing teacher, and writing is what I do in a blog. There should be some value in being a practitioner, walking the walk to invoke 12-step cliche. Blogging isn’t the only writing I do, but it’s part of it and something they should, I’d say, honor in what you do.
I’m in a different boat at the community college–my blogging doesn’t really “count” except that it demonstrates my technological currency and helps me keep up with what’s going on in this huge field we call “English.”
In terms of effecting change at your school, at this moment in time you may simply be giving the military some exposure to the world of academic blogging, so that it becomes a distinct skein of the genre. Whether it flourishes at a military academy or not remains to be seen, but as an academic, you are keeping up with and participating in your discipline in ways that may seem ordinary twenty years from now.
And, Happy Holidays, Mike, to you, Tink and the lovely Ms. Z.
Bradley, I can see how my statement might have sounded like “if you don’t get credit for it, don’t blog.”
I think what I really meant was more like “It’s best if you can get credit for blogging, but blog because you want to — don’t try to use it to impress colleagues who aren’t interested in that sort of thing.”
Sounds like excellent advice, Dennis, and it brings me back to the value question: what one can exchange something for in terms of “credit” or cash or advancement isn’t always where its value — or the motivation for doing it — lies.
Sgt Mike, what would Lenin do?
I don’t think we’re really at odds Dennis. I just think if one is going to blog for the joy/heck of it, if credit can be had, it should. I do, though, have to take into account that Mike is at a much more traditional venue than I, but what the heck, if he can shake things up there at that staid joint, why not give it a go? I know that many won’t be impressed by any blog (you should read George Will’s editorial of a few days back, maybe Xmas day it ran in Seattle) and you can see the elitist attitude he has about blogging. I suspect there might be some in his camp at WP. Still, in many respects, Will is a blogger with a print presentation. What is an editorialist but a blogger? Or a blogger but an editorialist? If one were to write editorials in a print publication, they’d be given credit. Why not in a blog? Because it’s not filtered the way print is filtered? Will would want the riff-raff kept out, labeling their words solipsistic (which a lot of blogging is), well, I best put this ramble to a rest here. Let us know what you decide Mike, if you like. Happy Holidays, Merry Xmas, and Happy New Year and all that to everyone!