Akkam’s Razor

Whenever blogging is brought up in regards to academics, all one usually hears is that the topics, discussions, and comments that one makes in their collegiate youth may come back to haunt them in the workplace.  One needs not look further than the teacher declined employment because she appeared in a pirate costume on her MySpace page (me-thinks this is religious discrimination against Pastafarians).

There is an academic upside to blogging, however.  Having struggled with a paper for my most recent graduate class, I started thinking about how to integrate my blogging style into my academics.  If I can churn out hundreds of words at a sitting, researched, quoted, and referenced, then surely I could do the same regarding academics.  What if I blogged my weekly readings, bookmarked external resources on del.icio.us, and posted relevant current outside research and news, audio, and videos.

There are two Wordpress plugins that I've installed to facilitate this - one being Footnotes, which allows you to insert as footnotes anything that you've enclosed in double-parenthesis, and the other being InSeries, which allows you to group a series of posts together in a specific order as a named series (similar to creating an outline and then fleshing-it-out).  A third plugin (Academic Citations) that I was looking at provides a 1-click reference to show readers how to properly cite your blog academically in any one of several formats, but I'm not quite there yet.