The value of education should be put into the individual and not a degree or a program or a school, etc. I don’t care if your degree came from Harvard or was created in an app. What can you do? What are your strengths? That’s what’s important. That and Oreos…

As an English composition instructor, I can definitely see the benefits of blogging regularly in an academic setting. So often, students seem hesitant or intimidated by their own writing. They don’t want to sound stupid or they don’t know what to say. Blogging is a good way, not only to get them writing regularly, but also to get them over the hump of starting the writing process. It also provides them with a means to situate their writing, knowing they will have an audience and that their work will (potentially) be seen by “the world.” It makes them cognizant of what they write and how they sound on the web, which is an invaluable lesson to learn in college before students enter the “real world.” You even said that you saw improvement in your writing by consistently by updating your blog. This the sort of exercise that is good practice for composition students. Thank you for your enthusiasm and for taking the time to be on the web, in front of a screen for a few minutes longer. Keep it up!

Not to be the solitary and definitive voice of the humanities, but rather as someone who is pursuing a career in the humanities and humanities education, I would argue that there is indeed quite a bit of content within the humanities. I’ve always seen the humanities as the conscience of academia, where the sciences are the mind, the humanities are the soul. But yes, political correctness is a double-edged sword, but if my understanding of at least this course–and by extension, the crux of the blogging argument–is correct, then the point is to elevate one’s content in order to not just occupy public space, but to make a contribution to the public knowledge. Blogging, and other inter-connected sites on the web, can absolutely be used for frivolous means. But in academia, the impetus is to produce something, to join the conversation. Blogging is about speaking to your niche and so much of academia rests on communication. The web allows us to bridge the gap between the individual and the public so as to create an ever-evolving academic community consistently engaged in discourse. I think, if that is the end goal, it is worth a shot.