Daniel Drolet writes…

If you’re reading this blog then you must be interested in blogs.

But that doesn’t mean academics know much about them, or their uses in teaching.

So to find out more, I attended a session this morning called Academic Blogs: Connecting people and ideas. (The session was part of Career Corner, a regular feature of Congress 2009. There are several sessions a day focussed on career development.)

The session left me with two rather contradictory take-away messages: On the one hand, blogs can be useful in an academic environment – particularly for engaging students and encouraging debate. But on the other hand, how do you overcome the fact that they take up time and can contribute to information overload?

The four panellists – all of them bloggers – gave several reasons why blogs are useful.

“I do it to keep a conversation going with students,” says Mary Cameron of Memorial University. “It’s very interactive.” Cameron says they allow students who have missed a class to keep with the flow, and she sometimes asks students to write blogs in so they can get a sense of what it’s like to deal with making their thoughts public.

Carolyn Steele, who writes Career Sense, a blog for academic job seekers on the University Affairs website, says blogs are an alternative way of interacting with people.

And moderator Dale Kirby says they are especially good for interacting with students who are uncomfortable speaking out in a classroom.

But with so many Web 2.0 tools out there, doesn’t it all get to be a bit much?

As one participant said: “I’m concerned that we have too many people speaking and not enough people listening.”

Cameron acknowledged that’s an issue: Blogs take time to create, and they take time to read. What good is a blog if no one reads it?

Wayne State University’s Michael Barbour, who writes about online education at the K-12 level, says the answer to that question is not as daunting as it might appear.

First, he says anyone interested in blogging should at least know why they want to do it and who they want to reach. These things are usually for a well-defined audience.

Plus, he says the blogosphere is being cleaned up: The number of blogging tools is decreasing as small companies get bought out by larger ones. So the whole area is becoming less chaotic and more focused.

He says he deals with information overload simply by asking himself: “Who are the three most important people I need to pay attention to?”

The problem, I think, is finding those three people.

Random Congress notes:

* I came across some rather amusing T-shirts for sale at the Book Fair. Among the sayings on the T-shirts: “I survived peer review.”

* So why do people come to Congress again and again? “It’s becoming a reunion for my friends,” says Sean Lawrence, an assistant professor of English at UBC’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna. He’s been to several gatherings. He says that he enjoys running into people he knows. He also takes time for a bit of tourism. He had time on Tuesday, after his association meetings ended, to head off for a quick visit to the Canadian War Museum before catching his flight home.