Why Post in Teacher Blogs?

 Faculty blogs serve a number of purposes.  The following is an attempt to argue why and how blogs can help the faculty members of HEIs improve their professional stature and teacher profile in various ways.

1. Writing is a key communicative and professional skill. It is very common to come across faculty members who struggle to communicate with clarity, conviction and correctness whether it be in English or in mother tongue. Whatever be the causes which led to this state of affairs, a blog - personal or an institutional one - can help improve this skill. If a couple of hours can be set apart each week for this purpose, it will lead not only to improving the writing skill, but it will also help the teacher leave behind a body of writing which could be cured into more serious works later. A couple of dedicated hours for the blog can be periods of self training too. Starting small with incremental writing can help one slowly master the fundamentals, eliminate the syntactic errors one is prone to and develop a style of writing of ones own, in the long run. 

2. A blog can be the space where your ideas can be tested whether it is creative or academic. The faculty members can use the space to write away from their academic compulsions or to write into it! This testing at one level is the testing to know if one can write, while it can also be a test of one's capability to write on a specific area.

3. The faculty blog is also where one can explore new ideas, the novel offshoots of one's domain. A new topic / text one has to teach can be the focus of blog post. One can start off with an introductory post and can built up with more follow-up posts later, digging deeper and exploring further. Areas allied to one's research area too can be the source of such exploratory writing. 

4. The faculty blog posts can be where the early avatars of a research article take shape too. What you wrote about because of an early hunch may remain to intrest you and spur you on. The faculty blog posts can be the testing board where early thoughts are on display. On follow up thoughts, this will grow and put on flesh and can end up as a research article. 

5. At times a faculty member can co-write  a post for the blog with a student. It will be an honour for the student to appear on the Dept or Personal faculty blogs. This is fine provided the faculty doesn't simply add her name as 'first' author for a post which a student wrote or is made to write. What is labelled collaborative may be permitted to be authentically so.

6. A faculty blog is a space which will help professional branding too. The fact that a faculty member is maintaining a quality blog with regular posts, exploring matters of relevance and interest, sends the right message about the faculty member and her professional stature. The space can grow into a meeting place for those with similar interests and even for those who watch people with professional drive and presence.

7. Faculty blogs are a necessary digital extension for the academic bodies these days. For one reason or another, the HEIs are expected to prove their digital capabilities in many guises. Student and faculty blogs are key fixtures on the institutional websites. Hence rather than have a faculty blog which is there to meet the obligation, it is better to have one which offers good takeaways for the individual members. The digital tools and spaces need to be put to professional development purposes by the members of the faculty.

8. There are many faculty members who park materials directly linked to the study needs of students on their blogs and websites and this is absolutely fine. Provided one doesn't lose sight of the other multiple uses to which the blog space can be put to.

The blogs are spaces where one can write about anything. Movies, places, food, friends, memories, events, websites, public issues, dreams, persons, media lies or political incorrectness - any of these or anything else can be the subject of ones blog post. It can be the theories you teach, scholars you read about, projects you give to students, the dream dept you are building up or the book you mean to publish or up coming event of your Dept or a novel plan of your colleague. 

There are those among faculty members who feel that faculty blog posts are for those who can write well, that writing is not their cup of tea. This is wrong. It is meant for those who would like to write well too. More over, writing is a fundamental skill the faculty of an HEI must possess. Each of us need not be writer in the sense of being an essayist or a poet or a journalist, or even one who makes a living by writing. But for those of us who make a living teaching in the HEIs are expected to possess decent writing skills to perform one's responsibilities in terms of academics or administration. The time consuming and often irritating burden carried by those who can handle language well in an HEI can be done away with if more faculty members take efforts to improve writing competence through means like blogs. 

Babu. P. K., Ph D

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