I have no idea. I’m new to the pedagogy literature, but what I’ve seen so far makes me cautiously optimistic that switching from lectures to more problem-solving approaches can improve learning *in at least some cases*. There are situations where it probably is not a good idea. I also wonder to what extent the literature is subject to the file drawer effect by pro-change researchers and just a lack of studies from researchers who favor the status quo.

I agree that blogging for this course is helpful, but I’m not sure how much it adds over having discussions on a class discussion board. I guess it sets you up to continue blogging academically after the course ends.

I’m sure the team approach would reduce the amount of work for each individual while keeping readers interested with frequent posts. Dynamic Ecology is the closest Ecology has to a superstar blog. There are a handful of others with moderate traffic and not much else. Blogging hasn’t really caught on in Ecology as much as it has in say, Economics, and some of the early blogs are dead.

Regarding the department-wide blog, my lab has an arrangement like this for twitter. We each have to man the lab twitter account for a couple weeks per semester. I did a good job the first week, but hardly posted anything the second. I ran out of material!

I’m in the same boat. I develop statistical models for spatial mark recapture studies in ecology. Actually, I think the situation is worse for you. There are several wildlife biologists and ecological statisticians who are interested in what I do, probably more so than warehouses.

“Is blogging just another way to further separate ourselves from genuine dialogue with others about important issues?”

In my experience, this is the opposite of what happens on a good blog and associated comments section. Personally, I prefer to have dialog about important issues at the slower pace of social media (compared to an in person conversation). It allows me to think more carefully about what others have said, what I say, and I have time to look things up to support my positions. On the other hand, maybe these are things that I used to store in my brain, but have offloaded to my google brain!

I agree there are pros and cons for how the internet is changing our brains, what we remember, and how deeply we contemplate what we’re reading, but I’m more optimistic that it is a net positive.

Regarding the point that connected learning is just for the privileged, that may be the case currently, but internet access is increasing steadily globally
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage). If you extrapolate the 3rd world trend, they’ll be at 1st world levels in 20 years. And that’s not considering Google’s efforts to provide global internet access (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Loon) or the fact that people are increasingly accessing the internet on their phones and cell phone ownership in Africa is increasing rapidly (http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/04/15/cell-phones-in-africa-communication-lifeline/). Internet access is probably an easier to solve problem than running water.

Nice post, Carrie. Check mine out for another more skeptical take on academic blogging (http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/benaug/2016/01/25/academic-blogging/). I based it on this blog from Dynamic Ecology, that I bet you would find more nuanced and balanced that what we typically get assigned (https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/should-you-start-a-science-blog-ask-yourself-these-questions/). I think we’re both focused on opportunity costs, which the assigned blogs don’t mention.

For the most part, I think the only science bloggers that are going to get a large audience are the professional science popularizers who blog about science broadly, rather than in a niche area. We keep getting pressured to communicate more with the public, but I think another perhaps more fruitful route is to offload this job to the science communicators who do this for a living. Of course, one problem with this approach is convincing them that what you do is interesting enough to write about to a public audience. But if it isn’t why would you waste your own time doing it?

A second area of agreement is that improving your writing skills is not necessarily a good reason to blog. As pointed out in the Dynamic Ecology post, blogging does not commit you to writing–wanting to write is what causes you to have a blog, not the other way around.

PS, I’d rather be outside, too. Wildlife PhD student here.