Patter
Pat Thomson, Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, has just launched a new blog with a batch of interesting posts.
Having attended a number of her tough but highly effective sessions on academic writing in the School of Education, I am particularly familiar with her post on Swales and Feak’s exercises in skeleton writing. Her book with Barbara Kamler, Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision, has rightly become recognised as a key text (don’t be misled by the title – it’s just as useful for PhD students). The recently published Routledge Doctoral Companions (for students and supervisors), which she co-edited with colleague Melanie Walker, have also been indispensible in my own research.
Of course, these represent only part of Pat’s research interests and experiences, so it will be interesting to see how she decides to develop the blog. As @PatParslow suggested in a subsequent Twitter discussion, professorial blogging is all too rare. Yet in my experience of talking with other PhD students, professors who do blog can be enormously influential (probably far more than they realise) in legitimising blogs as platforms for research dissemination, particularly in under-represented disciplines.
Tags: blogging
