Blogging in the Academy

Sean Pollack offers a chatty interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick at Pomona College about Blogging in the Academy in the Fall, 2005, issue of The Newsletter of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education. Fitzpatrick discusses her views about what effects virtual (digital) ink will have on the practices of teaching and learning in higher education as well as academic publishing. She anticipates continued “conversations” to encourage student learning, fundamental changes in publishing, leading to better communication with the non-academic community. These views are not news in themselves, but of interest because of her position as an assistant professor at a nationally ranked liberal arts college. Students express on her class blog a wide range of commitment to conventional academic scholarship. KF offers a personal blog Planned Obsolescence and her course blog on Machine (an aggregator blog for students in media studies 149 at Pomona College) of interest to some academics. These are good reads for anyone interested in a glimpse into academic blogging. I wonder how Ms. Fitzpatrick would relate blogging and virtual ink to Jennifer Washburn’s point about University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education.