My 2008 Blog Book: Is It Worthless For Tenure?

2008 Blog Statistics

I was preparing some university evaluation criteria and I was thinking of ways to include the blog, as it is a big part of what I do. Because it is hard to make comparisons between online writing and traditional publications, I thought I would try to get a word count. At least that would give me some comparative figure because I know my typical educational journal article is about 8,000 words and my typical law journal is about 10,000 words.

Last year I wrote around 110,000 words on the blog in 252 entries (I took a few off for the entries that Scott wrote and some automatic text my blog editor generates).  

I got the word count by copying all the entries into Word. And, since I was in Word, I went ahead and generated all the statistics, which you can see in the top image. So, for the sake of comparison, I also provided the same statistics for my dissertation (the bottom image). Obviously, the statistics sort of speak for themselves here. In terms of the number of words, last year I wrote 3 dissertations. Dissertation StatisticsMy actual dissertation, plus two more dissertation's worth of text on the blog. Or, we could say that I wrote about 12 journal articles worth of words. And, this is not even counting the videos I made this year. 

So, I figure my blogging activity in 2008 is at least worth about a book. In fact, I went ahead and prepared that book (in case anyone calls me out on it) and I am officially going to publish it here. (Go ahead, download it - you can read it on your Kindle).

The Edjurist: 2008 Blog Book (Word)

The Edjurist: 2008 Blog Book (Adobe)

You'll find links embedded in those so that if you want, you can link back out of those documents to the Web. In effect, its a more interactive book than normal (even if it does have substantially less organization and/or coherence). 

Anyway, the point here is not to brag on all the writing I do on the blog, it is to point out the absurd world of tenure and evaluation reviews that fail to take this into account in anyway whatsoever. Realistically, I can put the blog as "other writing" if I'm lucky and "service" if I'm not -- either of which really count very little. What counts is journal articles ... 12 of them, in fact, over 6 years. Oddly, remember, that is about the word count equivalent to what I wrote on the blog this year. 

Now, I will absolutely grant that most of what I write on the blog is not as high quality as what I write in law and education journals. Also, even though people comment when I am wrong, the peer review aspects of blogs in no way equal the peer review quality in journals. So, there is certainly a differential in worth between 10,000 words in a blog and 10,000 words in a peer-reviewed journal. However, those 10,000 words in a blog are not worth nothing, as is essentially the case presently in tenure committees around the country.   

I have obviously thought a lot about what to do about this problem (this is an educational law problem after all) and I really think evaluation and tenure documents need to include a distinct category for electronic publications. Just as no two peer reviewed journals are created equal (my stuff in no way is equivalent to what comes out of the medical school), no two electronic publications are created equal. Just as readership statistics are rarely considered in peer reviewed evaluations, I don't think readership statistics should play that large of a role in considerations of electronic publications. I am not against them being included, but we judge the quality of these journal articles by reading them, and we should do the same for electronic publications. Just as respected peers judge the quality of a tenure & promotion applicant's print materials, they can do the same for electronic materials. Drs. McLeod, Becker, Brady, Gibbs, Upstead, and many others, including practitioners in both education and law, can speak to the quality of this blog and their opinions can and should be considered in evaluating my contributions to the field.  

Luckily, I am the co-chair of the Technology Committee here at the College of Education and I think that this topic is going to be high on my agenda (once we get the new website up and running). I don't think we need special consideration for electronic publications, we just need some consideration because clearly some blogs (perhaps this one - hard to ignore 100,000 words in one year - that's a lot of google searches answered!) are contributing substantially to the field and should be considered in tenure and promotion decisions.   

Comments

[Zorka Karanxha]

Hi Jason,
I agree with you and see the value of your blog and your Ed Jurist website. As a matter of fact, I am writing to let you know that I am adding Ed Jurist as an online resource, under "list of resources" in a monograph Perry Zirkel and I are writing on Student Teaching and The Law. It will be published by ATE sometime in 2009.

Best,
Zorka Karanxha
Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership & policy studies
University of South Florida

[musicisall]

thats impressive.....
musicisall