Suele estimarse en nuestro medio (chileno) que los blogs académicos (ver más abajo tres artículos de interés sobre estos blogs), esto es, aquellos blogs producidos por miembros de la academia y dirigidos de preferencia a públicos universitarios y profesionales, son una actividad que se hallaría por debajo de la ‘seriedad’ propia del quehacer intelectual y de sus productos típicos: publicaciones en revistas con editores exigentes, libros y capítulos de libros, presentaciones en congresos científicos, etc.
Por el contrario, la cada vez más amplia difusión de este otro medio –el del blog académico– revela que la comunicación esotérica de conocimientos está siendo complementada por la presencia de los profesores universitarios en la red, así como, crecientemente, en los espacios de prensa, televisión y radio.
En los Estados Unidos, los economistas parecen llevar la delantera en este nueva ola de comunicación y expresión académica.
Van aquí algunos blogs de refrerencia y la manera como sus autores, economistas reputados, los presentan:
Dani Rodrik’s weblog – Unconventional thoughts on economic development and globalization
Greg Mankiw’s Blog – Random Observations for Students of Economics
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal
The Becker-Posner Blog – A blog by Gary Becker and Richard Posner (ese último, Senior Lecturer in Law, Universidad de Chicago, y judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit)
Freakonomics – Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Blogs académicos iberoamericanos
Simon’s Blog, de Simón Schwartzman, en combinación con su sitio de publicaciones
Roberto Rodríguez Gómez, blog sobre temas educación superior
Tiscar.com, Tíscar Lara, profesora ayudante de Periodismo en la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid en las asignaturas de Producción Audiovisual y Tratamiento de la Información en Televisión
Otros Blogs académicos de interés
Crooked Timber – Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity no Straighyt Thing was Ever Made Blog colectivo de un grupo de académicos de diversas nacionaloidades y disciplinas:
— Chris Bertram, Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, and Head of the School of Arts at the University of Bristol
— Michael Bérubé, Teaches American literature and cultural studies at Penn State University
— Harry Brighouse, Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Educational Policy Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison
— Daniel Davies
— Henry Farrel, Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington University.
— Maria Farrel, Brussels office of ICANN
— Eszter Hargittai, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Department of Sociology, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University and Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science(Stanford, CA)
— Kieran Healy
— John Holbo
— Scott Mc Lemee, Columnista, Inside Higher Ed
— John Mandle, Chair, Departmen of Philosophy, University at Albany, SUNY
— Monatgu Norman, (psuedónimo)
— John Quiggin
— Ingrid Robeyns, Senior Researcher in Political Theoy, Radboud University, Nijmegen
— Belle Waring
— Brian Weatherson
ACADEMIC PRODUCTIVITY is a survival guide for the 21st century researcher. Written by a small team of academics focusing on the topics on knowledge acquisition, production and dissemination, new technologies and productivity strategies. Autores: Jose Quesada, Department of Psychology, Sussex University; Sjane Lindsay, DPhil Student in Psychology, University of Sussex; Dario Taraborelli, Postdoctoral fellow at UCL, editor of the European Review of Philosophy
Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog
News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture…and a bit of poetry Brian Leiter holds the Hines H. Baker and Thelma Kelley Baker Chair in Law at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also Professor of Philosophy and Founder and Director of the Law and Philosophy Program.
Lessig Blog Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Chicago.
PressThink – Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine Jay Rosen teaches Journalism at New York University, where has been on the faculty since 1986. From 1999 to 2005 he served as chair of the Department.

TRES ARTÍCULOS SOBRE EL BLOGING ACADÉMICO
The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas
By HENRY FARRELL
The Chronicle Review, for the Chronccle of Higher Education
October 7, 2005
In July 2004 an anonymous blogger revealed his identity when he allowed his photograph to be taken at the Democratic National Convention. “Atrios,” the writer of a prominent left-wing blog, Eschaton, turned out to be Duncan Black, an assistant professor of economics at Bryn Mawr College. Black had worried that a trenchant political blog might be perceived as inappropriate for a young academic and also wanted to avoid invasions of his personal and professional life. He went public only when he had quit the academy to join Media Matters, a watchdog organization.
Many young academics who are thinking about blogging share Black’s dilemma. Is it a good idea to blog if you’re on the job market or have a nontenured position? Tenured academics who blog face relatively little risk when they express controversial opinions — they have job protection. It’s a different story for academics without tenure who want to blog. They may worry that their colleagues would find their blogs objectionable, damaging their career chances, and either blog under a pseudonym, like Black and the law professor “Juan Non-Volokh,” or not blog at all. Younger scholars may also worry that blogging would eat up time that could be devoted to publishing articles or working on a book. Few if any academics would want to describe their blogging as part of their academic publishing record (although they might reasonably count it toward public-service requirements). While blogging has real intellectual payoffs, it is not conventional academic writing and shouldn’t be an academic’s main focus if he or she wants to get tenure.
But to dismiss blogging as a bad idea altogether is to make an enormous mistake. Academic bloggers differ in their goals. Some are blogging to get personal or professional grievances off their chests or, like Black, to pursue nonacademic interests. Others, perhaps the majority, see blogging as an extension of their academic personas. Their blogs allow them not only to express personal views but also to debate ideas, swap views about their disciplines, and connect to a wider public. For these academics, blogging isn’t a hobby; it’s an integral part of their scholarly identity. They may very well be the wave of the future.
Look at what’s happening in the disciplines of law and philosophy. According to a recent count by Daniel J. Solove of George Washington University, 130 law professors have active blogs. David Chalmers of Australian National University lists 85 philosophy professors or Ph.D. students with blogs, mostly oriented to the discussion of philosophical issues. In both of those disciplines, those who don’t either blog or read and comment on others’ blogs are cutting themselves out of an increasingly important set of discussions. Casual empiricism would suggest that blogs play a less important role in the social sciences, the humanities, and the hard sciences — for the moment. But in those disciplines, too, blogs are becoming more prominent and more widely accepted.
Why are so many academics beginning to blog? Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition. Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. Academic blogs, like their 18th-century equivalent, are rife with feuds, displays of spleen, crotchets, fads, and nonsenses. As in the blogosphere more generally, there is a lot of dross. However, academic blogs also provide a carnival of ideas, a lively and exciting interchange of argument and debate that makes many scholarly conversations seem drab and desiccated in comparison. Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won’t replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.
What advantages does blogging offer over the more traditional forms of academic communication? Blogging sacrifices some depth of thought — it’s difficult to state a complex thesis in the average blogpost — but provides in return a freedom and flexibility that normal academic publishing can’t match. Consider the length of time it takes to publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal. In many disciplines, a period of years between first draft and final publication is normal. More years may elapse before other academics begin to publish articles or books responding to the initial article. In contrast, a blog post is published immediately after the blogger hits the “publish” button. Responses can be expected in hours, both from those who comment on the blog (if the blog allows them) and from other bloggers, who may take up an idea and respond to it, extend it, or criticize it. Others may respond to those bloggers in turn, leading to a snowballing conversation distributed across many blogs. In the conventional time frame of academe, such a conversation would take place over several years, if at all.
Once you get used to this rapid back-and-forth, it can be hard to return to the more leisurely pace of academic journals and presses. In the words of the National University of Singapore philosophy professor and blogger John Holbo, the difference between academic publishing and blogging is reminiscent of “one of those Star Trek or Twilight Zone episodes where it turns out there is another species sharing the same space with us, but so sped up or slowed down in time, relatively, that contact is almost impossible.” Which is not to say that blogs and more conventional forms of publishing can’t complement each other very nicely. Lawrence Solum’s Legal Theory Blog and Alfredo Perez’s Political Theory Daily Review are excellent examples of how blogs can improve the circulation of ideas in a field, by highlighting new, interesting papers and giving brief descriptions of their contents.
Academic blogs should be especially attractive to younger scholars, to whom they give an unparalleled opportunity to make their voices heard. Cross-blog conversations can turn the traditional hierarchies of the academy topsy-turvy. An interesting viewpoint expressed by an adjunct professor (or, even more shocking, an “independent scholar”) will almost certainly receive more attention than ponderous stodge regurgitated by the holder of an endowed chair at an Ivy League university. Prominent academics who start blogging do have an initial advantage; they’re more likely to attract early attention than people without established reputations. But if they want to keep readers and attract other bloggers’ links over the medium term, they need to provide provocative and interesting content. Otherwise, they’re likely to fall by the wayside.
By the same token, less-well-known academics, and nonacademics with interesting things to say, have a real opportunity to speak to a wider public and to establish a reputation over time. In this respect, the blogosphere resembles not only the Republic of Letters (where a printer’s devil could become an internationally renowned intellectual), but the “little magazines” in their golden age, when established scholars, up-and-comers, and amateurs rubbed shoulders on a more or less equal footing. This openness can be discomfiting to those who are attached to established rankings and rituals — but it also means that blogospheric conversations, when they’re good, have a vigor and a liveliness that most academic discussion lacks.
The recent debate on the Theory’s Empire anthology, organized by the Valve, demonstrates how blogospheric argument can work. Theory’s Empire is an ambitious volume, which seeks to provide a dissident’s version of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism and to argue against the perceived pre-eminence of “theory” in literary criticism. The book is now beginning to attract attention from the mainstream media and will probably be the subject of symposia and debates over the next couple of years. A semi-organized symposium on the Valve, the blog of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, allowed a wide-ranging and active debate on the book within several weeks of its publication. The debate included responses from authors of pieces in Theory’s Empire, as well as from prominent academics like John McGowan (an editor of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism) and Michael Bérubé, both of whom have successful blogs. But it also included, on an equal footing, responses from nonspecialists, like the Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong, and from nonacademic bloggers with an interest in the topic, like Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly. The result: an unusually high level of intelligent discussion around a topic more usually associated with stale pro- and anti-theory polemics. As McGowan describes it, “This is not yet another round in the culture and theory wars. … Is it possible that academics interested in such questions have won their way through to a place where they can be discussed and examined calmly? As someone whose most usual stance has been a plague on both your houses, I am hopeful.”
Most important, the scholarly blogosphere offers academics a place where they can reconnect with the public. The links between academic argument and wider public debates are increasingly tenuous and frayed. It’s far harder than it used to be for academics to become public intellectuals (not that it was ever very easy, or very common). This has malign consequences, not only for the quality of debate on both sides of the divide, but also for public perceptions of the academy. It’s also a source of considerable frustration to many academics, who either believe that their academic expertise could be valuable to a wider audience, or resent the distorted public perception of what they do. Blogging democratizes the function of public intellectual. It’s no longer necessary for an academic to lobby the editors of The Washington Post’s op-ed page or The New York Review of Books in order to make his or her voice heard. Instead, he or she can start a blog and (with interesting arguments and a bit of luck and self-promotion) begin to have an impact on the public conversation.
This past summer saw an excellent example of that. Many scientists have started to blog because of their frustration with the treatment of science in the mainstream media; several of these bloggers objected strongly to a recent article in The New York Times on the politics of evolutionary theory. In the eyes of these scientists, the article gave the impression that there was a real debate between evolutionary biologists and intelligent-design proponents, rather than a controversy that had been cooked up by fringe figures for political reasons. Their objections soon attracted a response from the article’s author, who sought to defend the piece in the comments sections of the group blog Cosmic Variance and on P.Z. Myers’s Pharyngula. The ensuing debate not only illustrated how badly suited the “he said, she said” style of journalistic writing is to topics where there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on one side of the question, and a congeries of cranks and crackpots on the other; it also provided a point of tangency between science journalism and science as it is practiced by scientists, allowing a back-and-forth argument between the two positions.
Nor are scientists the only academics who have taken up blogging in order to connect to broader public debates. Literary theorists who lament the problematic public image of their field should look to the example of Bérubé and McGowan, who are happy to weave discussions of critical theory and its significance into their more general blogging. Scientists who are dismayed at the sloppy treatment of science in the media have set up group blogs including the Panda’s Thumb (evolution), RealClimate (global warming and climate science), and Cosmic Variance (physics). Other disciplinary group blogs include Savage Minds for anthropologists; the Volokh Conspiracy, Balkinization, and Prawfsblawg for legal scholars; the Duck of Minerva for international-relations theorists; and Cliopatria for historians. All of those blogs weave back and forth between the specialized languages of academe and the vernacular of public debate. They are creating a space for dialogue between the two, connecting them together, and succeeding, to a greater or lesser degree, in changing both.
Both group blogs and the many hundreds of individual academic blogs that have been created in the last three years are pioneering something new and exciting. They’re the seeds of a collective conversation, which draws together different disciplines (sometimes through vigorous argument, sometimes through friendly interaction), which doesn’t reproduce traditional academic distinctions of privilege and rank, and which connects academic debates to a broader arena of public discussion. It’s not entirely surprising that academic blogs have provoked some fear and hostility; they represent a serious challenge to well-established patterns of behavior in the academy. Some academics view them as an unbecoming occupation for junior (and senior) scholars; in the words of Alex Halavais of the State University of New York at Buffalo, they seem “threatening to those who are established in academia, to financial interests, and to … well, decorum.” Not exactly dignified; a little undisciplined; carnivalesque. Sometimes signal, sometimes noise. But exactly because of this, they provide a kind of space for the exuberant debate of ideas, for connecting scholarship to the outside world, which we haven’t had for a long while. We should embrace them wholeheartedly.
Henry Farrell is an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University and a member of the academic group blog Crooked Timber.
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Blogging and the Disciplines in Academic Life. How far is it from “always link” to “only connect?”
Jay Rosen
This session continues a thread begun here by Michael Watkins and crowd. We will be about blogging and academic life, but in between those two terms I have placed a third one– “the disciplines.” Otherwise known as your department.
Everyone who understands the modern university, anyone who has been immersed in an academic field, is familiar with these terms. A discipline is an organized area of study. It’s also the people who study in that area, those who are said to be “in” the discipline. To know your discipline is the first requirement for membership in the academic community at its advanced levels.
And if you want to get an ID card, you better know what department and school you belong to. The disciplines rule the unversity because people in the university belong to them.
But also because they “form” people in their image. Political science begets political scientists. Then the scientists raise little ones. They publish journals, of course. They form assocations, and those associations endure. They meet annually in New York, Las Vegas, Atlanta. The disciplines, some have argued, even sink deeply into the self. For sure they perpetuate themselves across generations. They permit the mind to specialize and build up advanced knowledge. They also orient scholars to each other to create a sense of “belonging,” even though some of the most talented people have always had an urge to rebel against the boundaries and other conceits of a discipline.
We believe in the disciplines– that is, the institution does and we accept that. And we rebel against them because they are silos too. We know that university life is dominated by the disciplines because universities and the people at them are forever struggling with how to create “inter-disciplinary” experiences and “cross-disciplinary” course work. How to bust out: no one’s ever really solved that problem.
Well, here comes blogging. And not to get too cute about it, but blogging has a discipline to it, too. How far is it, really, from “always link” to “only connect?” What do the big disciplines think about blogging and the Internet? Should we tell them what’s happening? Do the disciplines care if some stray academics are blogging up a storm? (And why are some disciplines so over-represented? I bet you have your theories about that!)
Suffering from their own link death for a long time
We know there are all kinds of academics doing it. (Just look at Crooked Timber’s List, organized by–well, what else?–discipline.) But we don’t know what it means that academics can now blog– especially, what it means for work in the academic disciplines, which have been suffering their own link death for a long time. Students of the modern research university–and Stanford, the host campus, is one of those–sometimes call it “the iron law of the disciplines.” It’s a way of saying they always win out, in the end, no matter what comes along.
So along come the bloggers, and the new Republic of Letters they call the blogosphere. Does it even make sense to blog within a discipline? Does disciplinary training help you blog? Or is the discipline what you overcome in order to blog and blog well? Is there something in the act of blogging that forces the blogger to address a broader public, or is that just a conceit?
Anyway, this a session about blogging and academic life with a third term, the disciplines (including your discipline) as point of departure. And there will be more departures, more points, before BloggerCon meets and at the event.
Tell me what you think of these questions and my rough sketch of the puzzle. We’ll take it from there. I’m Jay Rosen. I write this weblog and I have a PhD. Been an academic since 1980. I’ll be your moderator. I did it once before.
# Posted by Jay Rosen on 10/6/04; 11:19:08 PM – —
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Academic Blogging: Some BloggerCon III Afterthoughts
Eric Briys
I have not been blogging in a while. Well, reason is that we went with my business partner on a Cyberlibris round-the-globe tour visiting leading/rising business schools. Fascinating and inspiring believe me. Check forthcoming posts as we’ll share our enthusiasm and information for what’s happening there. On our way we made a stop at the Stanford Law School and attended the BloggerCon III conference. This was the third of its kind and it gathered many very active members of the blogging community.
In our view, the best session was the one devoted to Academic Blogging. The discussion leader was a “veteran blogger”: Jay Rosen. Jay is a Professor of Journalism at New York University. He also runs a famous blog named PressThink.
Jay did a great job and lots of key issues were debated. The first thing that struck us was the small number of people in the room. The other sessions attracted a lot more people. This came to us as a surprise. Indeed, blogs seem to be part of the “compulsory panoply” of any academic especially most of the students already have their own blogs. The second thing that was cool is precisely the high percentage of students in the room. refreshing indeed!
The main points covered in the discussions were the following:
Why should academics blog ? : Seems to be the obvious number one question. Was funny to see that most of the academics in the room did not have a straightforward answer to this. Our view is simple: They should in order to extend the richness and reachness of their pedagogy. The best answer came from the students themselves (they were from the Law School, the School of Medicine etc…): We think our professors should blog because this is a great way to know them better (that’s right: a blogging professor sticks his/her neck out).
What changes for academics when they blog ? : This is the point: Academics are afraid more often than not of what could change the pace of their academic life. One professor in the room said that blogs were “disruptive for the Ivory Tower”. Great, that’s what we want! Another professor added that “the University has never been great at distributing knowledge”. That’s why they nicknamed it the Ivory Tower. Well, it doesn’t have to be so, especially in the so-called knowledge economy. Blogs are wonderful tools to expand the reach of knowledge. This would be an oxymoron not to take advantage of it.
What’s the potential effect of blogging in the academic world ?: Well, we don’t know yet but we can try to anticipate some effects. First, it will make academics more visible and more accessible to society as a whole. There is no reason why the academic community should remain a remote tribe almost as difficult to access as some African tribes in the XIXth century. Second, it will provide academics with a straight access to ideas, suggestions, comments and challenges (stemming not only from their colleagues but also from people outside their “specialized world” which will eventually improve the quality and relevance of their teaching and writing. In a sense, a blog is a place where the academic accepts to be a “primus inter pares.” Not always easy to accept when you’re supposed to be the one who knows. A blog is a good way for an academic to put him/herself at risk. in the course of doing so, some nice and unexpected rewards (famous law of unintended consequences) may be reaped.
Why do academics make good bloggers ? : Well, the question should be “why would they make good bloggers?” Bad news first: They may not be good bloggers after all if they are not willing to stick their neck out of the Ivory Tower. Good news then: Most academics do write and do communicate. A blog is a great addition to the panoply.
Blogs vs. Blackboard : One faculty member in the room was asking whether e-learning platforms such as Blackboard or WebCt had any future now that we have blogs and wikis. Well-taken question indeed! Unless these e-learning firms do embrace the blog trend, it will become more and more difficult to see what their added value to the end user is all about (especially when you factor the sheer price of their platform in the equation). This boils down to the forever debate: Home-made vs. ready-made.
Publish or perish ? : One professor noted that “Academic journals should have their blogs. Professors could post comments, reviews on articles. Everybody could look at these discussions and expand on them.” This would indeed be a major breakthrough for most academic journals. After all, a published (refereed) paper has been evaluated by a handful of people. Would not it be nice if people could post their views, criticisms etc…, publicly on a blog, even after the paper has supposedly earned its credentials? The peer community would expand as a result. Blogs are also a great way to disseminate one’s research. Think for instance of the success of the SSRN (which is not a blog) and it should be obvious what blogs could achieve in the field of academic research too. That’s where we disagree with the notion of academia creating value through scarcity. SSRN is precisely the opposite!
How do blogs affect the value of attending university ? : Blogs are a unique way of leveraging the value of attending university. You should not think of blogs as competing with the university system but as a unique opportunity to revisit it and make it even more attractive.
How can we make blogs more attractive to academics ? : Make them simple to use and lead by example. There are already a few good blogs around (e.g. Walter Baets, Nouriel Roubini, James Mahar etc…)
Who should be the audience ? : This a matter of individual choice. Some professors want to reserve their blog in-house (to their students only) while some other want to make it public, open to a broader audience. But again there is no rule except the famous one: Just do it!
Blogs as a student learning tools : Many students do have blogs. Hence, it should not prove too difficult to convert them to blogs as learning tools. Professors could even learn one or two things from their students.
University policy towards blogs? :Here is how Claude Muncey, one of the participants, summarized the issue “In the end, summing up, what becomes clear is the disruptive effect that blogging has on the academic world, which is founded on the idea of control, more than dissemination of information is an “attack on the DNA of the university” and we will see attacks on blogging in academia and attempts to simply graft blogs onto current publishing and control structures” (See also jzip’s account)
We are not sure that we are willing to share the pessimism of this last point. Yes, faculty members are reluctant to change. Yes, scarcity has often been the major currency traded by the academic world. But, things change: Most kids, these days, blog. The challenge for faculty members will be to adapt, to be on the same page as today’s kids when these kids will show up in the amphitheater. Moreover, the dividends from academic blogging are numerous, as the session run by Jay at BloggerConIII has shown: What matters is the willingness to capture them, not to say to invent them.
As usual, (academic) attitude can and must defeat (academic) latitude!