While blogging’s earliest advocates operate on the “information wants to be free” principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought. | “Information is power” is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you’re hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there’s also a heads-down, bunker mentality utterly unsuited to the openness required for a convincing weblog, be it an external PR effort, or knowledge-sharing internal one. —Neil McIntosh
—Why blogs could be bad for business (Guardian)
A few months ago, I was at a fancy on-campus dinner event. The university president, JoAnne Boyle, was working her way through the crowd, laying on the charm. I was part of a little group of people who were treated to a funny story about a well-known donor who called with some crotchety advice about one of the big topics on campus. When we all finished laughing at the punch line, I asked for the donor’s first name again, because I hadn’t caught it, and someone kidded me, “So, is this for your blog?” We all chuckled, but JoAnne’s face turned white, and she quickly went off to charm someone else.
A little while later, as she was giving an impromptu welcome speech, she noticed who I was sitting with, and said, “The reporter who’s the bane of my existence is sitting next to the faculty member who’s the bane of my existence!”
Everyone turned around to see me recovering from what was almost a spit-take.
I don’t think of my own blog in terms of power… goodness gracious, I’m just trying to teach a few things and enjoy doing what I do. I noticed that Alexa, a website ranking service, has placed jerz.setonhill.edu above www.setonhill.edu, and has recently replaced the screen capture of Seton Hill’s home page with a screen capture from my own curricular home page. (My curricular website gets 57% of the traffic to the *.setonhill.edu domain, and the main site gets 29%, at least according to however Alexa measures it. The blogs.setonhill.edu subdomain gets 12%, by the way, which is up from 8% the last time I checked.)
I don’t really know what any of this means, but, like businesses, universities also operate with a rigid power structure; administrators know things that faculty members don’t need to know; tenured faculty members know things that their nontenured colleagues don’t need to know.
Since I know that some of my students read my blog, I’ve found myself screening my blogging, since I don’t want my blog to give away the “big twist” I want to throw into my lecture. And one day last term when I was very sick, a student blogged about how mentally befuddled I was. That student wrote sympathetically, but what if she hadn’t?
Many of the students who started blogging for me last semester will be blogging for me again in different classes this term. I’ve learned a few things about instructional blogging… for one thing, I need to get the students reading each other’s blogs more. We spent perhaps too much time counting the number of comments each blog entry generated, and not enough time getting students to link to each other’s conversations. I’ll be introducing three classes to blogging this week, and I plan to move pretty quickly from the basic “show me that you can post a link” to writing thickly-linked texts, with well-chosen links that not only demonstrate the student is keeping up with other blogs, but that gives readers a map to good reading online. We’ll see what happens.
The entrenched business culture may not adopt blogging beyond the basic public relations and customer service approach. But a university’s function is to educate — to pass on skills and knowledge, by giving students the intellectual tools, in a microcosm of the society that awaits them after they graduate. Progressive educational philosophy emphasizes empowering the student. A weblog forces students to come into contact with that outside world a little earlier, which can be a burden. But with that responsibility comes power.
I’d rather the university president not think of me as the bane of her existence because of my blog, but at the same time, it’s nice to be noticed.
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You'd win the lunch... in December 2003, the average on this site was 1564 pages/day and 634 visits.
I can see I misinterpreted these stats. Thanks to both Mike and Jess for keeping me humble! :)
While Alexa is a good tool for getting an idea of where you sit in the bigger picture, it pales in comparison to the useful information provided by parsing the log files on the web server. Remember, your ranking in Alexa (jerz.setonhill.edu) is actually the domain as a whole being ranked. In short, jerz.setonhill.edu and http://www.setonhill.edu are the same report. It is the report for setonhill.edu as a whole.
Please notice that ?www? is not even included in the percentages indicating subdomain popularity.
The http://www.setonhill.edu domain provides over 6000 pages per day to an average of 2100 visitors per day. These figures have been steadily growing.
I?ll be the first to say that I enjoy this site and read the articles on a regular basis. I think that many others like this site and visit it daily as well. I will also say that I have not analyzed the log files for ?jerz.setonhill.edu? (I don?t mess with your server/webspace). I will GUESS that an analysis of the log files for this site will show that traffic is nowhere near 6000/2100 pages/visitors a day. I?d even bet a lunch on it.
Uhh....you might want to review your traffic analysis. As far as the homepage shown on Alexa, it's one from before I got here. My efforts to change it as well as the tag line ("A private Catholic college in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.")have been fruitless.
Here's the Alexa link that shows the stats I mentioned. You're right about the screen capture; the image was recently added to the set of stats that focus on my specific jerz.setonhill.edu subdomain, but I didn't notice that I was looking at a different dataset. I've got hundreds of pages of writing handouts that tend to be popular as professors look for links to add to their syllabi before term starts, and towards the end of a term, when students are clicking on them heavily.
Heh. Very true. For all I know, 99.9% of the people who reach my pages are disappointed or annoyed by what they find. A different site with less traffic that better serves a smaller number of people would be more laudable. And thank goodness the corporate mindset does not prevail at SHU. The university can't mismanage itself out of existence, so of course bean counting is important.
And that's exactly why I see blogs being so useful in education. If we were metering knowledge the way the water company meters water, we wouldn't overwork our students, we'd aim to teach as little as possible in our courses. Instead, we are happer when our students are learning more, learning faster, and are better prepared to replace us sooner!
The point I forgot to make in my comment above was that universities have some semblance of "intellectual freedom" (particularly post-tenure) and thrive on open discourse and difference, whereas corporations can more easily enforce their expectation that all employees tow the company line and not act against their vested interest.
Though I'm not comfortable with the way you elide the differences between a corporation and our university -- and though, honestly, I think Alexa is a bunch of statistical nonsense and that, in fact, ALL "web stats" are a ruse -- the article you link to at The Guardian was really interesting. The final two paragraphs really hit home. Every blog has the potential to be a whistleblower on some organizational secret as much as it advertises the organization. That's the double-edged threat of all writing, isn't it? Information is power...yes!
Don't take my slam about Alexa/webstats the wrong way. I think your site is the content king of the SHU domain. Sure, there are other elements that our students use more often than your blog, and there are reasons why people won't return to a campus home page....your blog is chock full of freshly updated CONTENT and LINKS to more of it. I enjoy giving you hit after hit on a daily basis. More "power" to ya, too, DGJ!