The Chronicle of Higher Education has two online stories related to scholars who blog. The first by Ivan Tribble (a pseudonym), Bloggers Need Not Apply (July 8, 2005) asks “What is it with job seekers who also write blogs?” It goes on to suggest that, “More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible.”
The other by David Glenn from the issue of June 6, 2003, is titled, Scholars Who Blog. It starts with the question “Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?” Glenn goes on describe actual cases of scholars who blog and provides a case study of one that took off. Glenn is more sympathetic:
Blogging also offers speed; the opportunity to interact with diverse audiences both inside and outside academe; and the freedom to adopt a persona more playful than those generally available to people with Ph.D.’s.
I would add that blogging can also be a way of connecting to unanticipated other researchers and a way of opening/sharing the process.
Alice is a programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon that is designed for teaching programming, especially to girls. It uses a drag-and-drop interface and it focuses on creating virtual worlds, animated movies and simple games that can be exported to the web. They have just recieved support from Electronic Arts to use The Sims content (characters) to enahce the sophistication of the resulting animations. The development of Alice is driven by research into teaching programming.