Productivity for Professors: Part Five, Blogging for Professors

This is the fifth posting in a series of 7 blog postings, in which I explain some of the productivity tools that I use (or have used) and would recommend to university faculty members.

These are the other items in the series:
Email | Calendar | Collaborative Editing | To-Do Lists | Blogging for Professors | Reading Blogs | Exercise and Nutrition

PART 5: Blogging for Professors

Topics in this Part:
5.a. How to use blogs to organize your classes
5.b. How to use blogs for your research

There is a ton of information on "how to use blogs in general" available in books and on the internet itself, or just ask your cousin/niece/mailman/anyone-with-a-computer. This posting, therefore, focuses on uses of blogs FOR PROFESSORS. Well, specifically, I tell you how I've used blogs myself for two purposes: my classes and my research.

5.a. How to use blogs to organize your classes

Here is the way I use blogs for my classes:

1. I have a main Elon web site (this is the site you're on right now). I use Blogger (free service, owned by Google) to create this site. The site has two areas: the sidebar and the main content area, used as follows:


1. Sidebar: Contact info, CV, Calendar, links to my individual course blogs


2. Main content area: Messages to the public that are of general interest to my students (office hours, interesting or funny things I have read online, research announcements, etc.)


2. I have course web sites for each of my courses - these are separate blogs, one per course. I use Blogger to manage these sites. These course blogs also have two areas: the sidebar and the main content area, used as follows:


1. Sidebar: Links to home, blackboard, syllabus (electronic only), assignment documents (i.e. PDFs of the homeworks, etc), my calendar, any other course-specific links


2. Main content area: This is where I put our daily agenda and lab descriptions. There ALWAYS an entry for every single day of class. Students are trained on Day One to visit the web site daily to see what we are doing in class. Here is a screenshot of a sample web page from one of my classes:

click to enlarge in new window


Students like the "one stop shop" for class material. The only thing I use Blackboard for are quizzes/tests and the online gradebook. I remove all other features from Blackboard so that the students are not overwhelmed with useless links when they do go there. Here is a screenshot of how Blackboard looks with the useless content removed:



Note that I keep a link on Blackboard to my own web site and to their own course web site. Some students prefer to NOT remember my course web URL and they prefer instead to get there by logging into Blackboard each day.

5.a. How to use blogs in your research

There are a million ways to use blogs in your research, but one way that I want to highlight here is to use a blog as a "public research notebook" on the progress of a particular research project.

For instance, I have a project that I have been working on for several years called the Steampunk Project. I use Blogger and a custom template to control this site.

Using a blog to track my progress on this project serves several purposes:

1. It gives me a central place to post notes, ideas, links I stumble on, graphics, etc


2. It gives me a publicly-available place to show the work I've done. The people who fund/care about this project sometimes feel good when they know that I've been very transparent about my progress.


3. Because the details about the project are Google-accessible on the public internet, this means that I can sometimes (purposely or accidentally) start a conversation with someone who stumbles across my site and might have ideas for me. This can be very interesting. I can also polish my ideas for an audience without the high bar of publication.


4. Because the blogging software (for example, Blogger or Wordpress) handles the nuts and bolts of the publication process, it is very fast and consistent for me to publish my stuff.