Hace unos días informábamos sobre Blogs académicos: una realidad, el liderazgo de los economistas y ejemplos de interés en el mundo e Ibero América.
PARTE I. ¿Qué son los blogs académicos?
En un reciente posting (27 julio 2007) en The Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Bartlett se pregunta: What Is an Academic Blog Anyway?.
Ver texto completo, comentarios iniciales y vínculos interesantes más abajo.
PARTE II. ¿Riesgos asociados a blogs académicos?
Otro interesante artículo publicado por The Chronicle of Higher Education el día 28 de julio 2006, se refiere a los potenciales riesgos del blogging académico.
En efecto, aquí un grupo de destacados académicos norteamericanos (cada uno, además, un bloggista), discute sobre el efecto que sobre la carrera académica de Juan R. I. Cole, professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and president of the Middle East Studies Association, podría haber tenido su polémico Blog, Informed Comment – Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion. donde ha expresado sus opiniones críticas a G.W. Bush sobre la Guerra de Irak.
Artículo completo y debate entre los académicos
Comment, four years ago, Juan R.I. Cole became arguably the most visible commentator writing on the Middle East today. A professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and president of the Middle East Studies Association, Cole has voiced strong opposition to the war in Iraq and to the treatment of the Palestinians, garnering him plaudits from the left and condemnation from supporters of Israel and President Bush’s foreign policy. In the words of a colleague, Cole has done something no other scholar of the region has done since Bernard Lewis: “become a household word.”
In the spring, Informed Comment took center stage in another arena — Cole’s own career. After two departments recommended him for a tenured position at Yale University, a senior committee decided last month not to offer him the job after all. Although Yale has declined to explain its decision, numerous accounts in the news media have speculated that Cole’s appointment was shot down because of views he expressed on his blog. We asked seven academic bloggers to weigh in on Cole’s case and on the hazards of academic blogging.
The Lessons of Juan Cole, by Siva Vaidhyanathan
The Politics of Academic Appointments, by Glenn Reynolds
The Trouble With Blogs, by Daniel W. Drezner
Exposed in the Blogosphere, by Ann Althouse
The Invisible College, by J. Bradford DeLong
The Attention Blogs Bring, by Michael Bérubé
The Controversy That Wasn’t, by Erin O’Connor
Juan R.I. Cole Responds

What Is an Academic Blog Anyway?
Is it any blog written by an academic, even if the posts are about the messiness of the blogger’s house (warning: The language is a little, um, rough)?
Is it a sober blog written by academics about their particular discipline – like this one.
Something in-between? All of the above?
And, as long as I’m asking rhetorical questions, does it make a blog better if you throw in a liberal dose of personal information? Do you, for example, care that I’m eating a sandwich right now? What if I told you it was a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich?
I don’t know. I’m asking. Also, I’m eating.
Thomas Bartlett | Posted on Friday July 27, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
Hmmm…. According to the FAQ at Academic Blogs (for which Henry Ferrell is using a wiki, BTW),
What are the necessary qualifications for a blog to be listed? They’re pretty simple – the blog has to be written by an academic. That is to say, the author should be either a member of a third level institution’s faculty (i.e. community college, college, university, technical institute or whatever), or pursuing a doctoral degree, or employed by a third level institution to do academically relevant work (such as working as a university librarian).
Hence, my blogs (e.g., EBDBlog.com) apparently qualify, even though I treat them more as a public service than as an academic outlet.
I don’t know either, and I’m out of snack crackers.
— John Lloyd Jul 27, 04:05 PM #
How about a member of the Motion Picture Academy?
— Parker Jul 27, 04:30 PM #
Academic blogs differ from other blogs in that they can be just as stupid, but they will have letters after the writers (or school affiliations) name that will mislead a tiny fraction of the real world into thinking they are worth reading as opposed to the Left-nut bag blogs, the teenage sex blogs, and the predator lying blogs, and the pseudo politico blogs, the gamer blogs …urp.
A new concept: the blog clog created by a food dude eating McCrap while abandoning life for virtual gluttony.
— Muap Conners Jul 27, 05:16 PM #