Higher Education often pulls us in multiple directions as the steady churn of institutional objectives competes for attention. In a busy world, writing becomes something we only do when deadlines insist, leaving little space for the kind of reflective pause that helps us make sense of our work and the culture around us. As co-editors of the SEDA Blog, we see the power of blogging in the way it offers a small workable format to create room for thoughtful consideration of our practice. Similar to HERDSA in Australia, SEDA is a UK organisation dedicated to the advancement of learning and teaching in higher education, including but not limited to educational development

Academic writing is often slow, and formal. It is designed to persuade through established academic conventions and familiar structures, but this does not mean other forms of writing are less robust. Blogging can be equally considered and rigorous, while freeing writings from the expectation that ideas must be presented through a fixed pattern. It invites us to foreground a question, an observation from practice, a tension or an emerging position without needing to settle every debate or anticipate every counterargument.

Blogging as a scholarly contribution

Far from being less rigorous, blogging supports a different kind of rigour. It asks for clarity of thought, transparency about standpoint and responsiveness to context. As such blogging helps us test and shape complex ideas while they are still forming and it does so with the educational audience in mind, inviting readers to reply, disagree, add resources or share parallel experiences. That immediacy allows ideas to circulate quickly, strengthening community knowledge and open routes to collaboration.

As blogs gain recognition as credible scholarly communication, they offer accessible entry points into ongoing debates, especially within professional learning networks. This is particularly visible in communities such as HERDSA and SEDA, where the blog becomes a space for slow thinking in public.

The community conversation

Scholarly communities like HERDSA and SEDA don’t just come together at conferences: they represent opportunities for continuous, evolving collaboration. This happens in diverse forms, but the blog in particular allows us to create a sense of the community voice as posts proliferate around shared interest and values. The blog as a whole therefore becomes a reflection of how communities like HERDSA and SEDA have evolved: one can click back through the years on the blog website and witness how the conversation, while always centred around learning and teaching in higher education, has shifted around that core in response to the many societal changes that affect HE.

Readers are just as crucial to the conversation as writers, if not more so. The HERDSA and SEDA blogs offer a regular ‘taste’ of an idea, project or reflection, sized just right for a coffee break and allowing the community to consider an idea in tandem. Reading a blog post isn’t a big commitment and is something we can do on a weekly basis even at busy times, keeping us in touch with what’s going on beyond our immediate institutional context. As a reader, we can reach out to a blog author, comment directly on the blog or even compose a post in response – but we can also just enjoy a thoughtful moment and let the idea percolate. The reader role can also be a gateway to the writer role.

Writing within the community

So how might writing for a community blog like HERDSA and SEDA support us in slow thinking and practice? Whilst all forms of writing have an audience in mind, community blogs in particular centre writing as engaging in a conversation with readers. At the SEDA Blog, our light-touch editorial process focuses on helping authors to consider the dialogues they want to create with like-minded colleagues and fellow practitioners. For example, are blog posts sharing a call to action, inviting readers to exchange practices, responding to previous posts and ideas, posing questions for the community to consider? This editorial conversation helps to extend authors’ ‘writing as thinking’ time and facilitates further thought beyond the initial idea or example of practice or outcomes of projects that are being shared. Authors are encouraged to reflect not just on their blog topic, but on the connections they want to make with readers through this topic.

The joy of blogging is that a piece doesn’t need certainty or conclusions or resolved arguments, it embraces the notion of a post as a starting point for ideas, thinking and conversations to continue. And this is particularly true of community blogs like HERDSA and SEDA. In this way, these community blogs embody key principles of ‘slow scholarship’ offering us spaces that support deliberation on ideas, thoughtful engagement with peers, and dialogic and relational thinking.

Connect with us

So for HERDSA and SEDA, we encourage you to begin your blog journey with these questions:

What are you thinking about today?

What community conversations do you want to start?

Blog Authors

Banner image generated by Chat GPT