Colleen Morgan has put forward a proposal for a Blogging Archaeology session at the SAA conference. My concern was that an explict blogging session would be case of preaching to the choir. Technophobes would have the convenience of skipping all the awkward talks in one package. However I think she’s proven me wrong. I think she’s got some useful ideas that could benefit from a conference session, in particular thoughts on privacy. I think this is a potential headache, especially if courses are going to encourage students to blog. It could be useful to help distinguish between anonymity and pseudonymity, and a conference might be the place to tackle this kind of question head on.
Sadly I don’t anticipate attending the SAA conference, but if there’s one session that will break out beyond the conference, then you’d expect it to be the one about blogging. You should keep an eye on Colleen’s blog Middle Savagery for more developments, but really Colleen is full enough of interesting ideas that you should be reading her blog anyway.
Maybe they could split it up in two talks ‘blogging for archaeology’ and ‘blogging for ‘biblical archeology’ as the latter already seem to have gotten the hang from it quite well. (Or my feedreader is biased.)
Are there any universities you know of that supply their students/departments with out-of-the-box blogs? It would be a good solution imho, as their departments pages are often quite outdated. (eg. University Libre Brusselles, at least 5 dig teams in non-Belgian fields, quite a bit of research ongoing in general. Latest update? early 2009, and says ‘we’ll update this soon’)
Another good question would be, although the courses in non-English countries are often in the local language, what should you blog in? English definitely reaches a wider audience?