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BY LIANA KATZ

In print | Published January 24, 2008

Over the past couple of years, the blog has come to dominate the online world. Everyone from celebrity gossip-mongers to dentists now have the ability to make personal musings known to a virtually limitless number of readers.

Academics have eagerly contributed to the blogging community, with professors jumping at the chance to discuss their favorite subjects. But how is this abundance of extracurricular information changing the relationship between professors who blog and students who read their blogs?

Blogs — short for the word weblog — have been an integral part of the Internet community since the 1990s. With Swarthmore graduate Justin Hall ’98 pioneering a more personal style of writing in the mid 1990s, the blog has become an extensive and often intimate medium.

History professor Timothy Burke has been an active blogger since 2002 when he began Easily Distracted, home to his ruminations on “culture, politics and other shiny objects.” A veteran web user, Burke saw blogging as “the next natural evolution of a kind of online writing that I had been doing ever since I had been a graduate student.”

Like Burke, film professor Bob Rehak had been posting extensively on various online forums when he began his blog, Graphic Engine, six months ago after being inspired by Professor Burke’s and other academic blogs.

Both Burke and Rehak appreciate the unique vocal platform that blogging offers them. While maintaining a fairly academic tone, both use their blogs to explore a variety of topics from a more personal standpoint.

“I feel free to indulge there my likes and dislikes, fannish excitement and grouchy kvetching,” Rehak said, “But it’s also a sketchpad for roughing out ideas and arguments.” Blogging allows Burke and Rehak to share these varied thoughts with an array of readers within and outside of academia.

The fact that students are included among the readers of Burke and Rehak’s blogs has never posed a problem. Both professors enjoy having students either post a comment on their blogs or respond to an entry in person. “College, perhaps Swarthmore in particular, is a place to develop your voice and hone critical thinking skills, so I’m always happy when I can exchange ideas with someone,” Rehak said.

According to both Burke and Rehak, there are a fair number of Swarthmore students and alumni who keep tabs on their blogs.

“It makes me think a professor is pretty cool if they have a blog, generally, and it’s nice to see them as fully-rounded people with families and lives rather than just as professors,” Lauren Stokes ’09 said.

Although students are eager to engage professors in discussions concerning their blogs, the role that blogs do and should ultimately play in the classroom is still very much up in the air.

Both Burke and Rehak have experimented with using blogs in their courses. Burke uses Easily Distracted to post syllabi in addition to a number of extended essays including his Last Collection speech from 2002. Rehak says that blogs encourage “collective conversation on course topics outside the classroom, as well as in getting students to pool knowledge and share resources.”

Burke also believes that blogs help students think through issues at hand with “reflective and personal writing.” Yet, Burke acknowledges that blogging may not prove useful in all academic settings.

“I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that everyone should have a blog, or even most scholars and students,” Burke said, “But the uses are surprisingly rich, if you think about the variety of ways you can construct a blog or wiki.”

However, Stokes sees academic blogs as an opportunity for professors, rather than students and professors, to communicate with each other.

“When I have something I want to discuss with [Professor] Burke, I’ll go to his office hours, but professors across the country can do that over the blog,” Stokes said, “For the student-professor relationship, face-to-face communication is definitely the most important.”

Visit Professor Bob Rehak’s blog at graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu and Professor Tim Burke’s blog at weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke.

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