Authors, professors, entrepreneurs, experts, and journalists use blogs these days to communicate with the world. However, have you ever imagined a blog being an origination of academic research? Never before have I considered this a possibility, but now I believe differently.
Blogs & Information
Blogs have brought about a huge increase in information. Blogs are also being written by people of all professions. Even news organizations utilize them as methods to better communicate with their audiences. So, why shouldn’t blogs be a legitimate source for journalistic and academic material? Just because a blog isn’t necessarily held to the same standards as a book or a magazine article, doesn’t mean that a blog isn’t a place where original, reliable, and factual information can spawn from.
Information Is Information
If a student quotes plenty of financial facts from a get-rich-quick book, a professor should be fairly concerned of the source. This proves that books can be unreliable. This proves that any source can be unreliable, and that means that any source could potentially be reliable as well. In other words, information is information. It shouldn’t matter what the format/media is.
We are right in the middle of an information revolution. Professors and school teachers who treat blogs as a naturally unreliable source of information are teaching the wrong idea. A student should be able to source a particular point from various sources, and blogs should be allowed. It won’t be too long before blogs are looked upon as more reliable than news organizations—then again, some people already see it that way.
Tell us what you think about blogs in the classroom. Do you believe that blogs should be allowed to be cited by students? Do you think that blogs will make more of an impact in academic writing?
[Image Credit: “School’s out for Summer!“—Conspirator | CC]
4 thoughts on “The Blogosphere’s Impact on Academic Studies and Writings”
I strongly believe that E-Learning is here to stay and you are right that information is information, no matter where you get it.
I have been trying to use the cyber world to help people prepare for various competitive exams and I am getting a good response.
As always I liked your article.
Thank you from India.
Sarbjit Singh
http://www.gjtutorial.com/news
Things are changing slowly in education, but there is distinct change going on as younger teachers who are plugged into the cyberworld enter the field. One of the skills that we need to teach our students is how to evaluate information sources, and then how to cite them. I always let my middle school students use websites and blogs as long as they did an evaluation, and then let me check it.
You make a valid point…however it is the teachers you are gonna have to convince. In every single one of my classes that I’ve had to do a research paper for we were not even allowed to use .coms for sources. lol…even my public speaking class wouldn’t let us use .com. So as much as some of us think that blogs are a valid source of information, our teachers and the education system do not 🙁
Interesting post. I will make sure to recommend this to my readers because it is one-of-a-kind.
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