Many scholars blog about their research. Whether you write about your work before, during, or after formal publication, blogging is a great way to get feedback from other researchers as well as attract media coverage and otherwise increase the impact of your work. This blog post from the ScholCommLab explains how to get started and helps to clarify different approaches to blogging as per your intended audience and your bandwidth for effort.
Interested in publishing with a university press? Check out AskUP
Today, I got an notification from MLA Commons discussing their migration to Michigan State. Of interest to us is a very helpful new site running on the Commons platform, AskUP, an author-facing site supporting all things university-press related.
Tell us! What do you need?
We’d like to use OpenLab to make this workshop series more effective for everyone. Our plan is to keep the pages and some of the posts public but make the interactive posts for participants private so only each year’s cohort can read each other’s responses to the prompts we’ll post. This way, we can support each other but keep our conversations limited to each other and learn collectively.
I would like to run a post every mid month to ask the group to reflect on goal setting and progress. If you would like a reminder to do this more often, please speak up! Would every two weeks work better?
Reflect on what kind of accountability you need. A hurrah or a (reminder) nudge? Do you need support from your fellow workshop members? Share your successes with the understanding that progress is progress whether you’ve written or not. Time spent brainstorming, immersed in primary research, or reading all are all worth reporting. If you’ve been overwhelmed with teaching and haven’t had time to make progress, reflect on whether or not you can create small, achievable goals for the next weeks and for the month.
Additionally, before every workshop, participants will have an opportunity to ask the next workshops convenor questions and after each workshop, participants can reflect on the most valuable thing they learned from the workshop and, if relevant, how they might employ what they learned.
Please comment below. I would prefer not to take time away from our next speaker on November 2 so hopefully I can briefly summarize our group response either on OpenLab or at our next workshop.
