Assuming that academics wish to have their work better known (and thus used), taking a few basic steps would significantly increase their visibility, writes Scott McLeod, director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE) at Iowa State University.
The first step would be for faculty to expand their department Web pages, he says. “Instead of merely listing their degrees, contact information, and courses, faculty could list their publications and their abstracts, post slides from their conference presentations, and upload copyright-protected drafts of working papers, all of which would give Internet search engines more information to index.
“Second, faculty could hyperlink to the journals and to the organizations that publish their work so that visitors could easily access them.
“Third, using wikis with their classes could create resources that benefit not only their students but also other audiences across the globe.
“Finally, faculty members could blog a couple of paragraphs about their work just once a week—thoughts, helpful resources, an interesting article or a book, a short summary of their latest idea—which would dramatically increase their “Google rank,” since search engines give preferential rank to blogs. They also would realize immeasurable gains from their colleagues subscribing to, and commenting upon, what they post.
McLeod observes that the era of search engines and the Internet is here to stay. “Academics who don’t take advantage of these new tools risk obscurity, and thus irrelevancy. As well, they miss out on substantial personal and professional benefits.”
(Thanks to Constructing Meaning)
[...] professors should take steps to make their presence larger on the web or risk obscurity. Blogs, apparently, are a good thing and rank highly in web searches. The blog should [...]