What does academic influence mean in an age of information abundance? This keynote delivered at the University of Edinburgh's #elearninged conference explores the idea of authenticity in the context of networked scholarship, and outlines ongoing research into why scholars use networks and how they read each others' reputations and credibility within them.

1. Networked Scholars
&…Authentic Influence?
Bonnie Stewart
@bonstewart
University of Prince Edward Island
Edinburgh 2014

2. networked scholarship
h"ps://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/8717211019/

4. influence = a complex equation
h"ps://www.flickr.com/photos/28517410@N02/5422484194/

5. networks & institutions
are both reputational economies

6. Those within the academy become
very skilled at judging the stuff of
reputations. Where has the person’s work
been published, what claims of
priority in discovery have
they established, how often have they been
cited, how and where reviewed, what
prizes won, what institutional ties earned,
what organizations led?
(Willinsky, 2010)

7. what does this mean?

8. NETWORKED SCHOLARSHIP
• Introduction
• Context: Information Abundance
• Content: Influence & Networks
• Conversation: Authenticity?

10. dissemination
of knowledge
what people
had for lunch
CHANGE IN
HIGHER ED
Premise:
Online networks enable different forms of
identity, legitimacy, and belonging
than institutions do

11. information abundance
h"p://www.flickr.com/photos/silaBx/9886617776/sizes/c

12. backdrop: changing educational culture
knowledge scarcity
knowledge abundance
open systems
public, institutional values
market values
closed systems

13. increasing pressure to go online

14. channels of abundance = networks
h"ps://plus.google.com/+DaveGray/posts/CQRVeKEsUvF

15. not about online/offline binaries
h"p://www.flickr.com/photos/zigazou76/5824384001/sizes/z/

17. networks require literacies
+ ACADEMICS

18. networks require time

19. so.
what counts as influence in scholarly
networks?

20. public identity = price of admission

21. not about tech

22. networked identities = multiple &
participatory

23. my research
• ethnography
• 14 (13) participants, 8 exemplars
• 3 months of participant observation on Twitter & blogs
• 10 interviews

24. dissemination advantage

25. but there’s more

26. community

27. connection
h"ps://www.flickr.com/photos/94342662@N00/3869483214/

28. access to the conversation

29. speaking from the margins

30. speaking back to academia

31. speaking back to media/culture

32. participating from afar

33. but.

34. liability & constraint

35. signal/noise filters
h"p://www.flickr.com/photos/promediagroup/5726389205

36. positioning fatigue

37. immersion required

38. not fully immersed yet?
h"ps://www.flickr.com/photos/zeon7/3204734196/

39. literacies for understanding academic
networked publics
Institutions Networks
product-focused process-focused
mastery participation
bounded by time/space always accessible
hierarchical ties peer-to-peer ties
plagiarism crowdsourcing
authority in role authority in reputation
audience = institutional audience = world

40. authenticity?
h"ps://www.flickr.com/photos/esellers/8090580072/

41. the word ‘authentic’ can be
dangerous in
digital contexts

42. authenticity online?
show your work
h"ps://www.flickr.com/photos/pooniesphotos/4452667112/

43. is it just a numbers game?

44. h"p://manipulaBon.no-­‐art.info/overview.html

45. profiles = identity work

46. profiles = information

47. profiles = institutional ++

48. fluencies that matter

49. there are real, complex global
conversations happening

50. keep learning to read them
h"ps://www.flickr.com/photos/koonisutra/7001349018/

51. “who dares to teach must
never cease
to learn.”
- John Cotton Dana, 1912

52.
thank you.
@bonstewart
bstewart@upei.ca