I will always remember the first time a student posted a critique of a big historical website as an assessed bit of coursework, only to be contacted (in the nicest way) by the team responsible for it. The student was flattered, and immediately engaged in a long conversation with the developers about what worked and what didn’t and how the student had experienced the site. In subesquent weeks, I saw the student’s work change – become more serious, thoughtful and generally just better. The particular course involved is really an exercise in encouraging students to become what I think of as aggressive and critical users of online historical resources – and blogging is a big part of it.

The one other point I would make about this, is that a traditional essay is designed to give students the skills of researching and presenting an argument in a way that is transferrable and relevant for a broader range of activities (even getting a job). As the process of running stuff changes, I just don’t see any downside in asking our students to practise a bit at what we all are increasingly called upon to do – to work in public and to show our research process.

I think there’s a handful of independent student (other than PhD student) blogs in Early Modern Commons, and there’s recently been a good students’ course blog (from an English dept rather than History) on 18th-century women writers.

Some universities have set up blogging platforms for their students, though I don’t know how common this is. Warwick was one of the first I encountered for a British university, some years ago, and it seems reasonably well thought out and quite active: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/

Sheffield have one of sorts too, but they insist on putting it all under university branding and it’s part of some over-elaborate social platform thing (which I think they actually *paid* for). What student wants to have a blog that looks like an official University webpage, ffs? (So, a couple of ways *not* to reduce the barriers.)

I wondered what had prompted the question at the start of your post – that is, how to ensure academics got more credit for blogging? Is it to try to encourage more academics to blog? Or to ensure that those who are already blogging get more recognition for it? My own experience isn’t really that generalisable given that I’m not an academic, but from my perspective I have found that blogging brings rewards outside the context you’d expect. For example I have ended up doing periodic reviews for History Today as a result of reviewing books on my blog. I also got an approach from an agent to develop a book proposal, although that came to nothing in the end. But I think that sort of recognition outside academia is something that blogs can definitely generate, and which would provide a means of recognition for some.

Generally though I think the best two outcomes I’ve got from blogging have been having an outlet to write for myself (nobody tells me to post, even though people do read it, which is in sharp opposition to the writing I do for my day job) – and also meeting lots of like-minded people (mostly virtually but a few in real life). While not recognition as such, they are an alternative reason to blog and one that I can see early-career academics, who have perhaps got bogged down in writing for others or ploughing quite a narrow scholarly furrow, finding attractive. Whether that’s enough, given the demands of the REF and the pressure to allocate one’s limited time to activities that generate a more corporate reward, I don’t know though.

While I am commenting I wonder if I might expand Sharon’s question to cover undergraduates and postgraduates? I think it’s still the case that most of the history blogs I see are written by people with PhDs or other postgrad qualifications. I can see how you might be put off from starting a blog altogether if you were just embarking on studying history. Have any of you used blogs in your teaching – that is, encouraged students to start them? Or have you come across students who started them independently? I started my own just before I began a Masters, but was in a slightly different position in that I was doing it part-time and returning to study after a number of years away from university. In that sense I had little to lose by blogging, but I was still careful to keep my name off it for at least a year or two. I think it was the Mercurius Rusticus affair which made me think I ought to be honest about attributing the views I was expressing. But it still felt like a risk – like one of my tutors might see it and criticise it, or that proper academics would be dismissive of it. Anyway that’s a very long-winded way of asking – what credit and recognition should students get for blogging, and what might be done to reduce the barriers to them starting in the first place/

I don’t think of them in the same category as personal blogs, and how well they work is still really dependent on personal engagement; but good ones – like some of the departmental group blogs that are popping up over here because universities are looking for ways to raise their profile for student recruitment – do possibly show a more creative way ahead than my nightmare scenario.

I could easily approach what I’m prodding away at in a rather different way, on reflection. How much of the worth of academic blogging is dependent simply on scarcity, the fact that only a minority of academics do it and therefore it stands out (good or bad)? Conversely, how many of the problems with academic publishing are the result, basically, of mandation and over-supply?

I argued up top that making blogging mandatory for all academics (and I do genuinely worry that’s where we’ll end up, in the UK at least) would destroy much of what makes it valuable. But you could also argue that making serial publishing compulsory for all academics, turning scholarship into a mass production line, destroyed much of the intellectual value of publishing. Because the people pulling the purse strings and making policy decisions don’t ‘get’ scholarship any more than they ‘get’ blogging.

(I say all of this as someone who has essentially stepped off the production line. I don’t believe I would still be working in a university if I hadn’t had that option. But it puts me in a decidedly marginal position; one day the projects may run out and then I’ll be a bit screwed.)

That said, I wouldn’t think it overwhelmingly hard to develop a measure by which a certain mass of blogging (by word count, perhaps, with some measure of impact through linkage and comment volume?) could be considered a “unit of output.”

Now when you get to the kind of DH stuff you’re doing, that’s a whole other mess…