I am still thinking of putting together this panel so if you are an academic and want to get involved please contact me!

We just launched some sort of editorial blog called “The Ideas on Europe Blog” (yes that is a very creative name . The main aim of this blog is to discuss how blogs and social media can be used by academics and researchers that work in European studies. The first blog post deals with ‘blogs as a teaching tool‘, however, more will follow soon. We also ‘relaunched’  the ideasoneurope twitter feed – so make sure you follow us @ideasoneurope.

Ideas on Europe is a collaborative website – and so is the editorial blog. If you have any suggestions or requests what kind of topics you would like us to write about – just get in touch with us. Moreover, we are always happy to discuss guest blog posts – for example if you are a blogging researcher/PhD student and you want to share your experiences regarding academic blogging, let us know.

Just a reminder that Ideas on Europe is a group blog for researchers dealing with Europe and/or the European Union. So if you would like to create a blog at ideasoneurope.eu just sign up here!

So, what if political scientists covered EU news in newspapers in that way?

(no, unfortunately I don’t have time to write something…possibly something for my to-do list

Ideas on Europe aims to invigorate current discussion on Europe by providing an impartial, unbiased online platform where individuals can engage in informed analysis, comment, dialogue and debate.

The organisation behind the projects is the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) a membership organisation with “over 1300 academics, practitioners and research students”. The aim is to get UACES members to contribute to the new platform.  At the moment the new page (beta!) is pretty basic and not much content can be found (except a post by nosemonkey), they are in the process of recruiting bloggers  (or better: motivating academics!) to open a blog on Ideas on Europe. So if you are interested, you can apply here.

In my opinion, the idea behind Ideas on Europe is quite good: Providing the (missing) link between academics working on EU topics and the public. However, working in (EU-) academia myself it could be quite difficult to get scholars to blog and read blogs regularly.

First obstacle: Among academics the knowledge of blogs and web 2.0 is not as widespread as one would assume. (= not worth trying)

Second obstacle: Blogs (not EU blogs – nobody knows them!) are often regarded as second class media. (= not worth reading)

Third obstacle is a sentence you will hear a lot in universities: “I only publish in peer reviewed journals – only this is useful for my academic career.” (= not useful)

It is really necessary to address these three (possibly more) obstacles in order to get an academic audience.  I hope UACES will also  manage to motivate enough scholars to blog regularly about their research (in a readable style!). Only if they manage to get a critical amount of (new) bloggers and a (new) audience the platform will be successful. Another danger is  academics who will only post the abstracts of their journal articles on the platform (or even the whole article…).  Publishing posts with ”call for papers’ and ‘conference announcements’ will also not do the trick…

As a bloggingportal editor (and a feedreader addict!) I hope cross-posting bloggers will be in the minority. (so, UACES please check babelblogs and blogactiv before admitting bloggers!).