Publishing about Contemporary Challenges

Full course description

As Inger Mewburna and Pat Thomson argue (2010, p. 1), “Academics are increasingly being urged to blog in order to expand their audiences, create networks and to learn to write in more reader friendly style.” The rationale behind this new development has to do with the fact that blogs appear to hold enormous potential for the development of skills among scholars (improving writing, expanding the readership, protecting your ideas, etc.). That is why the main activity for you to carry out in the second period will be to write a blog. However, this time there will be one formal specificity: you will write the blog in teams of approx. 4 students. Although there is no general consensus on the definition of blog, for the purpose of this course, we will use Walker’s (2003): “a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first.” Furthermore, a typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs as well. Beyond these general characteristics, the present course does not want to provide a one catch-all definition. Instead, it wants to leave students some freedom, in the belief that ‘blogs are whatever we make them’ (Conniff, 2005). In terms of content, groups have a considerable deal of freedom, although we recommend you to use the different findings coming from the individual literature reviews and the research strategies you did in periods 1 and 2. In any case, you should be ready to present a question/problem and communicate its potential contribution to a wider audience that might be interested in the general topic. And that is what you are going to do in this course: write a series of entries across the blog contributing to the main societal debates within your field. For that process to be efficient, all the members of the team will have to first find elements in common, agree on a joint strategy, write the sections, and manage the different parts of the blog all together. As you can see, writing the blog will be an interactive and dynamic activity with a multitude of tasks. Carrying out these tasks which will require a combination of individual and teamwork.