Carnival Of The Fac-Blogoverse

Carnival of the Infosciences offers librarians a convenient way to become familiar with different librarian blogs. Officially, the Carnival is described as “a weekly weblog post that endeavors to showcase the best posts in the blogosphere about topics related to the wide world of Library and Information Science.” But what about faculty blogs. There are plenty of them, but how many do you read on a regular basis? Do you know if any of your faculty have a blog? It seems that academic librarians should incorporate a few faculty blogs into their personal professional development regimen much in the way they should be keeping up with higher education news and events. It’s another way to be a well-rounded, well-informed academic librarian. So as a public service to ACRLog readers who may have yet to delve into the world of faculty blogs I thought I’d offer my own Carnival of the Fac-Blogoverse (if you have a better name, please let me know – maybe Carnival of the Professoriate sounds better).

Two things make this Carnival slightly different from the Carnival of the Infosciences. First, none of the items listed below have been sent to me by the bloggers, which is often how the Infosciences obtains its items. Second, the Infosciences is a rotating Carnival. Different librarian bloggers host each one. That’s not the case with Carnival of the Fac-Blogoverse – at least not yet. So let the Carnival begin:

Claire B. Potter, who blogs as The Tenured Radical, and is also Professor of History and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown Connecticut, has a detailed review and reflection of the book The No Asshole Rule. You heard of the book, but you’ve probably not read someone who puts it into the context of higher education institutions. The Tenured Radical says “here are some asshole behaviors that are particular to the academy, in my experience, and at one time or another I have been guilty of several”. Anything in this post sound familiar to you?

It’s time for a group research project decides Dr. Crazy, author of the blog Reassigned Time. An assistant professor at an unnamed college in the midwest, Dr. Crazy has a post about a new assignment that will help students with their research skills. It’s a group project and it’s not the same old term paper. Dr. Crazy wants the students to get to the library, but does a librarian get involved in the project? You’ll have to read it to find out.

Some faculty bloggers are discussing workloads and work schedules. Are faculty working too hard? Do they need to schedule more free time for themselves? You can pick up on the conversation over at What the Hell is Wrong With You, a blog by…well…you know, I’ve noticed that a quite a few faculty blogs are anonymous – certainly lots more than in the liblogoverse. I guess there are more concerns about how blogging will impact on careers and tenure decisions.

How could faculty not blog about their students. The Pissed Off Professor, otherwise known as Shawn Hensen, an Adjunct Faculty Member in the Language and Literature Department of Sacramento City College, takes her students to task for their underachieving work ethic. Heck, can’t they even staple their papers together before they turn them in (a pet peeve of my own!).

Over at Crooked Timber, a team academic blog, Kieran Healy wants to know what happened to the typing academic wife. Seems that before PCs academics depended on someone to type up their first book. They didn’t have employees so the job usually fell to the wife (or husband), and that was typically acknowledged in the book’s dedication. But Healy’s says it seems to be a thing of the past. Now, when is the last time you saw an academic thank a librarian for providing research assistance in a book acknowledgment?

Adjuncts are part of the fac-blogoverse too, and a new team of adjuncts (all who identify themselves) are sharing their thoughts about adjunct work at a relatively new blog called FACE Talk. The goal of the blog is to “promote a fair and equitable academic staffing system” so expect to see discussions about the issues relating to the lack of equity between adjuncts and other instructors in the higher education industry.

I hope you enjoyed this first Carnival of the Fac-Blogoverse. I’ll be back again with another one – and next time I’ll share some tips for resources for discovering faculty blogs. If you’d like to try your hand at organizing one of these Carnivals, get in touch and we’ll look into arranging it. If you are a librarian blogger who’d like to host the Carnvival at your blog, let us know and we’ll point our readers to it.