Last week, George wrote a post about academics and social media. In that post, he asked, “What’s been your experience with regard to social media and the academic world?”

As an academic with a keen interest in technology, I’ve been following the blogosphere for quite a while. At some point (I honestly can’t remember when, but at least as early as 2006), it occurred to me that much of the technology that interested me might also interest my students, and could even have some pedagogical uses.

Not being certain where to begin, I did what any good academic techie would do: I ran a Google search–and one of the results took me to some work by Dave Parry (@academicdave), who was then a Ph.D. student at Albany. I began regularly reading his blog, academHack, and also began following the blog of another young scholar, VTmtngrrl, who blogged at the most cake and later moved to...

My students can vouch for the fact that I’m a technophile. Over the last few years, I’ve asked students at various times to submit work via the Digital Dropbox in Blackboard, submit work via email attachment, participate in discussion boards in Blackboard, keep a blog of their own, contribute to a class blog, and use Zotero. This semester I’m asking students in my writing-intensive course to use Google Documents for their work, and I’m asking students in my upper-level seminar to contribute to a class blog and to use Zotero Groups (thanks to Sean Takats for the latter idea).

I teach Political Science–specifically, Political Theory. I’m not in a technical field. Why would I demand that students make use of digital tools in my courses?

My students might wonder that, too. There are several reasons why I do it. The first is a practical reason:

• Many of my students will end up ...

One of the things I’ve been trying to do of late is get into the habit of doing more regular writing. I have no illusions that I’ll keep much of what I write, but I find that writing something on a regular basis, even if it’s dreck, helps to keep the ideas flowing.

And even if most of what I write will never find its way into print of any kind, I want to save it so that I can mine it for possible material. How to save it, though? A few possibilities occurred to me:

• Do the writing in Google Documents. The upside: I can organize things into folders, and anything I put there is searchable. The downside: My Google Documents account has enough material in it already, and though the folder structure in Google Documents has some similarities to tagging, I still find it a bit unwieldy for anything but the simplest forms of organization.
• Do the writing in a private blog,...

Why, indeed?

If you only work with one blog, you may find that you really don’t need to use client software; the web interface may very well be sufficient to meet your needs. If, on the other hand, you manage and/or contribute to multiple blogs, a blogging client can be a huge timesaver. It can be especially useful if you use blogs for course management.

Currently I need to post regularly to several different blogs, three of which are for this semester’s classes. A lot of the information posted to each of my class blogs is standard for all of my courses: office hours, how to contact me, general course policies, and the like. I also use the blogs to notify students of campus events I think might be of interest to them. These announcements likewise need to be posted to all of my class blogs.

To be sure this kind of information appears everywhere it needs to, I could open a browser...

You’ve decided that you want to reduce the amount of paper in your course and that you want your students to develop collaborative and technical skills. So (perhaps after reading Julie’s recent post?) you’ve decided to use Google Documents. The ability to check the revision history will be especially handy given that you’re teaching a writing course that emphasizes the importance of revision.

And then you realize you may have a problem. One of the strengths of your institution’s writing program is that two readers in addition to the instructor read every student’s portfolio. This fact poses some difficulty for you because portfolio review is always done anonymously. Your students won’t be able to share their documents with their readers via Google Documents; they’ll have to print them.

That leads to the second problem. Portfolio readers want to see earlier...