Blogging as scholarship: Turning ideas into impact

Source: https://www.education.unsw.edu.au/news-events/news/blogging-as-scholarship-turning-ideas-into-impact Parent: https://www.education.unsw.edu.au/news-events/news-blogs

Blogging as scholarship: Turning ideas into impact

By Chris Campbell, Cherie Lucas, Sharon Aris, Diana Turnip, Patsie Polly, Brenda Tronson

Published on 3 February 2026

Writing a blog post allows us to share ideas, spark conversations and share learning and teaching insights, as well as connect with others. It’s an effective and efficient output providing a commentary with connection. Based on our experience, in the time it takes to wrestle a journal article through peer review, you can share various insights, reach a wider audience, and commence a conversation with future impact.

Academic blogging is more than a side project; it’s a fast, credible way to extend the reach and relevance of your research, or a kind of written ‘smoke signal’ to our colleagues!

At UNSW, where engagement and impact are woven into our mission, blogging offers an agile and accessible platform for scholars to connect, reflect and engage in conversation with broader communities without sacrificing rigour or quality. It has become a key focus within the Nexus Program, which seeks to foster networks of innovation and knowledge exchange across the university.

While blogging is not new, it remains under-recognised as a scholarly activity. In academic contexts, a blog post can be evidence-based, reflective, and analytical, drawing on the same foundations as other forms of scholarship, but expressed through a more immediate and conversational style. The blog by one Nexus Fellow PulsesRx has a recent post on elements to include in a blog post. Scholarly blogging can bridge practice, research, and professional engagement in powerful ways.

There are many reasons to blog, including increasing reach to a wider audience, enhancing professional visibility and magnifying citation potential. Importantly, it’s a mechanism for sharing ideas and promoting engagement across institutions and disciplines.

In many fields, blogging also demonstrates real-world impact, especially when supported by analytics, such as the number of views, location, and engagement metrics. Blog posts also allow academics to engage in a timely manner with current and emerging topics and debates, whether it is the role of GenAI in education, new approaches to assessment, or shifts in academic practice. Reflective blogging allows us to share our insights on methodology, supervision and pedagogy, including our many innovative Nexus projects.

Blogging is also a productive medium for third space professionals, as demonstrated by one Nexus Educational Developer, who has effectively modelled blogging to engage with current topics in higher education (e.g. Comparing Apples and Oranges, Never Waste a Good Crisis, and later explorations of AI-enabled storytelling). These posts show how timely, evidence-informed blogging can translate agile thinking to spark national and international dialogue in learning design.

Blogging can be a “quick win” scholarly output. It offers a low barrier to entry, enabling timely, creative, and collaborative scholarship.

Key advantages include:

Low barrier to entry: No peer-review lag, complex formatting, or submission hurdles.
Short-form writing: 600–800 words can effectively capture key insights or summaries of current topics.
Digital by design: Blogs can embed links, images, videos, and interactive media to support interdisciplinary storytelling.
‘Repurposable’ content: Blog posts can evolve into opinion pieces, talks, or introductions to papers, and can highlight scholarly outputs through linking them. In addition, creating a blog, microblog, media article, or peer-reviewed journal article from the same work translates scholarship and research into formats tailored to different academic and public audiences, supporting and enhancing knowledge dissemination.
Collaborative and iterative: Easy to co-author and to share across platforms.

Authoring as teams or individuals?

Both individual and small team blog posts can be easy to write and effective for collaboration. Blogs provide a means for colleagues to connect and provide benefit for the university as they can be reported as part of engagement and impact. This has positive implications for a large program such as Nexus, as these are tangible scholarly outputs that are legitimate and agile means of dissemination for education-focused academics to communicate their innovative approaches.

Blogs also have a distinct function and benefit in allowing authors to develop a distinctive voice, tone and confidence, to build their writing style for various academic genres, and to foster flexibility in the different writing styles of academic and public discourse.

Blogging is the doable, ‘low-hanging fruit’ of scholarly communication. It’s quick to do, easy to share, and surprisingly nourishing for your research profile. It bridges the gap between academic rigour and public relevance, and at UNSW, it fits neatly within our vision of connected, impactful scholarship.

Consider contributing to the UNSW Education blog series or explore the curated list of recommended academic blogging platforms to share your insights and expand the conversation.

AI was used for initial ideas for this blog post. An initial sentence on blogging was written to give ChatGPT context and prompts included: ‘why is it easy to blog’.

Learn about UNSW’s Nexus Program

Visit our Education and Student Experience news & blogs

Written a few blogs already? You might be interested in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): Your new academic superpower.

Have some important knowledge or discovery that the wider public should learn about? Submit an article to The Conversation, Needed now in Learning and Teaching, edited by Sally Kift and Jason Lodge, or Future Campus.

Blogging as scholarship: Turning ideas into impact