{"id":48345,"date":"2019-06-20T12:26:49","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T19:26:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.edu\/?p=48345"},"modified":"2019-06-20T12:26:49","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T19:26:49","slug":"things-it-has-taken-me-8-years-to-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/things-it-has-taken-me-8-years-to-learn\/","title":{"rendered":"Things it has taken me 8 years to learn"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Our good buddy The Thesis Whisperer wrote a fab post on \u2018how to run a blog for 8 years and not go insane<\/a>\u2018 in 2018. It is a cracker of a post and gives excellent insight into how TW has managed to maintain such quality and longevity!<\/p>\n

At the time it was published, I read it with great interest, hoping that I\u2019d be able to implement some of the strategies and not be writing things at 11pm the night before our weekly publication slot\u2026<\/p>\n

Alas, dear readers, Tseen did not implement any strategies.<\/p>\n

Is she sitting on her sofa right now writing this post at 10:36pm? Indeed, she is.<\/p>\n

The Research Whisperer celebrated its 8th birthday recently, and we posted this on our Facebook page:<\/p>\n

Today, we have published 383 posts, have almost 42,000 followers on Twitter, over 6400 subscribers to the blog, and over 9200 followers on our Facebook page.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was heartening to think about the community that surrounds RW these days, and the wonderful allies and friends we\u2019ve made. For me, it has been a career transformative time. Just before we hatched RW,\u00a0I was at a low, low career point<\/a>. Working with Jonathan has been a delight, and I would never have thought that we\u2019d have travelled this far down the road with our blog, being led by doing what we thought was fun.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to reflecting on having run the blog for eight years because of our birthday, I\u2019ve just finished running a series of three \u2018Blogging your research\u2019 workshops with my colleague Jamie Burford. Working with Jamie and lovely researchers during the workshops gave me the chance to articulate aspects of my blogging practice that I had not shared before. Not because I didn\u2019t want to share but because I didn\u2019t think I did anything special and didn\u2019t think it worth sharing.<\/p>\n

Here are three things that I\u2019ve learned from blogging at RW, managing\u00a0RED Alert<\/a>, and having run\u00a0my personal blog<\/a>(albeit much more erratically) over the last decade or so:<\/p>\n

Authentic voice and honesty creates connection<\/strong><\/h3>\n

When I started blogging about academia \u2013 way back when with a blog called \u201cAcademia 101\u201d (now defunct) \u2013 I sounded\u00a0so different<\/em>. I positioned myself as someone who had things to tell you because I felt I\u2019d been there, done that. I wanted to help other academics find their way, know the context of research, and know the games of academia. I still have this as a central approach but I quickly learned that I did not need to be seen as an uber-expert to have others engage and find value in what I said. I didn\u2019t need to write in an authoritative voice and it was actually better to cultivate a cafe-chat tone \u2013 sharing the low-down on things works best when you imagine you\u2019re in a cosy, conversational huddle. In fact, the writing that garners the most engagement is when I\u2019ve shared particularly vulnerable facets of my scholarly self. They are often the posts where I am \u2013 literally \u2013 hovering my finger over the publish button, wondering whether I really should put it out in the world. It was often hard to put into words one\u2019s own inadequacies and anxieties \u2013 what if I say out loud the things I\u2019m worried about in terms of my own shortcomings and abilities to cut it in academia and people agree? What if they see what I write and think less of me and what I might go on to do? Versions of these concerns still ramble around in my busy-brain regularly. I don\u2019t think they\u2019ll ever go away, but I\u2019m getting more used to having them ramble around with me rather than against me.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, I\u2019m glad I published those vulnerable posts. There\u2019s freedom in being myself on the blog, on social media, and in my everyday.<\/p>\n

Photo fun<\/strong><\/h3>\n

One thread that\u2019s constant in my talking about blogging is how much fun I have finding images and connecting them to a post\u2019s themes. I am so taken with this activity and feel that it\u2019s an important part of my blogging practice.<\/p>\n

I even wrote a post about it (of course), taking the angle of helping others find resonant, quality images to help convey the writing\u2019s content:\u00a0Finding the perfect image<\/a>. I particularly love it when I can make allegorical in-jokes with the images I might choose. I may be the only one who gets it and that\u2019s OK. I also particularly love it when I find out that a guest poster is keen on taking photos and I discover a good, evocative one to use on their post \u2013 see Dean Chan\u2019s\u00a0Going Freelance<\/a>\u00a0or Wade Kelly\u2019s\u00a0The Emerging Impact Landscape<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I still take photos at random, thinking they might be good for a post down the track. Thinking about the image prompts me to think about topics that might work with it, which feeds the ideas mill for writing. In addition, I have a long-standing (again, erratic) aim to make all the photos I take public domain and free for others to use \u2013 probably through Wiki Commons (hey, hey \u2013 that there\u2019s a future\u00a0#ShutUpAndWiki<\/a>\u00a0project).<\/p>\n

Online = awesome<\/strong><\/h3>\n

For me, having a strong digital presence and engaging consistently online with colleagues and peers around the world has been a gift that keeps on giving. I love it. My networks would be nothing near what they are if I kept to a traditional \u2018scholarly\u2019 lane and kept waiting for my work to speak for itself (a phrase that researchers often say to me when they express their hesitations about being on social media \u2013 that, somehow, if you share your work effectively online and people read it, this is less worthy than if other scholars unearth your journal paper from the mountain of other journal papers and deem it inherently Good and Worthy\u2026).<\/p>\n

If I only depended on going to conferences to meet new colleagues and hear about what others were doing\u2026I can\u2019t even imagine such a scholarly life, truth be told. The constellation of ideas, both serious and frivolous conversations, recommended resources and references, fab projects, witty peers, and shiny memes is hard to resist. It is my every day on Twitter and in certain niches on Facebook. There are occasionally irritating accounts to mute, habitual (and uninteresting) ranters to unfollow, and boors everywhere but they aren\u2019t my typical experience and I\u2019m certainly not at their mercy. I have an awesome social media stream full of interesting, ethical, funny, and generous people; many of them are (or have become) friends.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been hostile to online networks (far from it) but, over the years, I\u2019ve come to appreciate just how enriching, supportive, and fun they can be. I do so much work through these networks, and socialising, and learning, and supporting, and\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our good buddy The Thesis Whisperer wrote a fab post on \u2018how to run a blog for 8 years and not go insane\u2018 in 2018. It is a cracker of a post and gives excellent insight into how TW has managed to maintain such quality and longevity! At the time it was published, I read […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":48346,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15645],"tags":[12383],"coauthors":[11733],"class_list":["post-48345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","tag-blogging"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThings it has taken me 8 years to learn - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/things-it-has-taken-me-8-years-to-learn\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Things it has taken me 8 years to learn - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Our good buddy The Thesis Whisperer wrote a fab post on \u2018how to run a blog for 8 years and not go insane\u2018 in 2018. 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