Inservice prepared for Seattle Pacific University (March 13, 2018) regarding the space between desire to embrace progressive models of scholarship and the difficulties in establishing metrics and measures to ensure quality
Open Scholar - Navigating the Obstacles & Opportunities of Emergent Scholarship
1. Before We
Begin
Is there something you would
like to do as a faculty member
that you are not doing?
If so,what is it? What would this
look like, long-term, if
successful?What is the
obstacle stopping this?
Also: is there something you
are doing as a faculty member
that is valuable to your role as
scholar but is not identified as
scholarship per se? What is it?
What is stopping it from
receiving its proper value?Cypresses (1890) by Vincent Van Gogh.
On display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain
2. N A T I O N A L L Y R A N K E D
SPU is the only private university in the Pacific Northwest to make U.S. News & World Reportâs 2017 âBest
National Universitiesâ list.
Open Scholar
The Obstacles & Opportunities in Emergent
Scholarship
Rolin Moe, EdD
Assistant Professor
Director of Academic Innovation
Seattle Pacific University
@rmoejo
Twitter Hashtag - #scholarpd
3. The Root China (1699) Illustration from Johannes
Nieuhofâs
âAn Embassy From the East India Company of the
United Provinces, To the Grand Tartar Cham Emperor of
China.â
4. The increasingly transitory nature of what is
lauded as current or accurate in new and
developing fields, as well as the pace of
change in Western culture more broadly, has
made it difficult for society in general and
education in particular to define what counts
as knowledge. The existing educational model
with its expert-centered pedagogical planning
and publishing cycle is too static and
prescribed to accommodate the kind of fluid,
transitory conception of knowledge that is
necessary to understand the simplest of Web-
based concepts. The ephemeral nature of the
Web and the rate at which cutting-edge
knowledge about it and on it becomes
obsolete disrupts the painstaking process by
which knowledge has traditionally been
codified. Traditional curricular domains are
based on long-accepted knowledge, and the
"experts" in those domains are easily
identified by comparing their assertions with
the canon of accepted thought (Banks 1993);
newer concepts, whether in technology,
physics, or modern culture, are not easily
compared against any canon.
Cormier, D. (2008). Rhizomatic Education:
Community as Curriculum. Innovate: Journal
of
Online Education, 4 (5).
New England, New York, New Jersey & Pensilvania. (1732?) Produced by
Herman Moll, for John & Thomas Bowels.
Held at the New York Public Library. Public Domain
5. Credits
Bryan Alexander
Elena Brezynski
Margaret Brown
Tom Carpenter
Brian Chin
Ron Haight
Kristen Hoffman
Rajiv Jhangiani
Gene Kim
Michelle McFarland
Rebecca Moe
Keola Pascua
Still image from âA Star is Bornâ (1937, Selznick
International)
Dirs. William A. Wellman & Jack Conway. Public Domain
6. Credits (CONTâD)
Angelina Perez-
Barnum
Carol Redfield
David Rither
John Robertson
Bonnie Stewart
Ross Stewart
Matt Taylor
Sara Tseng
Jeff Van Duzer
Dominic Williamson
Jenn Wilson
Kenman WongStill image from âNight of the Living Deadâ (1968, Image 10)
Dir. George A. Romero. Public Domain
Public Domain
7. This presentation is best experienced in the full professional development
context. The slides are available for use under a Creative Commons
license (CC BY 4.0). Media created for this presentation are available
under a CC BY SA 4.0 license.
All images used in this presentation are cited and available under
open access licenses:
public domain
open access (CC0)
creative commons
Abandoned Dust Bowl Home (1935-1940) by Dorothea Lange
On Display at the J Paul Getty Museum. Open Content Program
9. There is a Gap
Between What We
Advocate For &
What We Value
Hall of the Ambassadors, Alhambra, Granada
(1909) by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida.
On Display at the J Paul Getty Museum. Open
Content Program.
10. The Traditions Around Scholarship
Are Not Sacrosanct
The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up (1838) by JMW
Turner.
On display at the National Gallery (UK). CC BY NC ND 4.0
11. Scholarship is a Social Justice Issue
Left: Lucy Red Cloud, Sioux. Right: Painted Horse, Sioux. 1899. By Adolph Muhr & Frank Reinhart.
Held by the J Paul Getty Museum. Open Content Program.
13. We Do A Lot of This AlreadyâŚ
âŚBut We Donât
Taxonomize It Well
Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga (1787-1788) by Goya.
On Display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.
14. Why Me?
Institute for Academic Innovation
Scholarship
Professional Development
Emergent Spaces
18. Question #1
What do you do in
your âscholarshipâ that
a âMoneyballâ
approach would omit
or not weight
accordingly?
Or
What do you as a
âscholarâ that is not
loaded into Banner?
Making Electrical Machinery (1928) by Clive Gardiner; commissioned by
Empire Marketing Board (UK)
On display at Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa. Public Domain
19.
20. The Supper at Emmaus (1601) by Caravaggio.
On display at The National Gallery (UK). CC BY NC ND 4
25. Bonnie Stewart, PhD
Prior to the digital era, scholarly knowledge was
traditionally organized around the premise that
knowledge is scarce and its artifacts materially
vulnerableâŚDigital content, however, is persistent,
replicable, scalable and searchable (boyd, 2011, p. 46);
digital knowledge artifacts can be distributed with
negligible cost to originator or user, and without being
consumed or diminished in the process.Thus widespread
and increasingly mobile access to digital knowledge
artifacts in âan abundant and continually changing world
of informationâ (Jenkins, 2006, Networking section, para.
1) marks a shift from an era of knowledge scarcity to an
era of knowledge abundance, even though access remains
inequitably distributed.
Yet the practices of scarcity do not simply dissipate in the
face of abundance. While the research and teaching
functions of the university have to some extent
incorporated digital knowledge artifacts, many aspects of
the techno-cultural system of the contemporary academy
remain rooted in the premise of scarcity, or the hierarchies
scarcity has fostered.
Experiential Education &Work-Integrated Learning
University of Prince Edward Island (CA)
In Abundance: Networked Participatory Practices as Scholarship
The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16 (3). June 2015
32. Emergence vs. Traditional
If we believe that scholarship can be more than
discovery-based, what is stopping us from fully
engaging that space?
What are steps we can take in order to consider peer
review and rigor in terms of emergent scholarship?
How do we ensure that innovation does not equal
novelty?
33. Bryan Alexander,
PhD
[Emergent forms of scholarship] have a
special promise. The material promise
is that we can do more scholarship, we
can ask and answer more
questionsâŚThe promise of
communication is about greater
efficiency but also greater
communication. There is open access
which creates a larger audience, but
also social media
In a sense this is revolutionary; we are
really taking scholarly publication and
transforming it into something new.
Taken another way, this is what the
digital world is like, this is not really
remarkable. Nothing I have described is
futuristic; it is a case of implementing it
and doing it.
A Digital Scholarship Scenario
Senior Researcher & Chief Executive Office
Bryan Alexander Consulting
39. Ideas into Policy
What do we need in order to grow our university
capacity to support emergent scholarship on a
systematic level?
What is currently happening, here and elsewhere,
that can help us in developing our policy?
What do you need as a faculty member to engage
scholarship in one or more of the ways mentioned
so far?
40. Rajiv Jhangiani,
PhD
Higher education, itself â if not broken â is certainly
delusional. For how else can we describe an enterprise
in which we continue to pretend that our students start
and finish at the same place and at the same pace?
Where we cling to the fantasy that our students have
unfettered access to required course materials. Where
our programs do not serve the modal student, who
works at least part-time and will no longer spend four
years studying full-time at the same institution. And
where we claim to value being âstudent-centeredâ when
in practice faculty, course content, accreditation or
testing requirements, and budgetary concerns drive the
learning process far more than students.
All of this is why I bristle when I hear the old âif it ainât
broke, why fix it?â argument. For if itâs not open, it is
broken, and thatâs precisely why we must fix it.
Open as Default: The Future of Education &
Scholarship
In Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are
Revolutionizing Education
& Science. London: Ubiquity Press. 2017.
University Teaching Fellow, Open Studies
Kwantlen Polytechnic University (CA)
46. Framework for Emergent Scholarship
1) Clear Goals
2) Adequate Preparation
3) Appropriate Methods
4) Significant Results
5) Effective Presentation
6) Reflective Critique
In Glassick, C., Huber, M.T., & Maeroff, G. âScholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the
Professoriate.â 1997. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Brooklyn Museum
National Gallary (UK)
The British Museum
National Portrait Gallery (UK)
What do we do?
How are we different from other manifestations of âacademic innovation?â
Tell the story about the innovation summit: 1/3 Tony Robbins, 2/3 âletâs set our objectives by first being sure
Whatâs important in a course? Acceptance of progressive pedagogies
Cultural shift for students â knowledge abundance vs empty vessel
Cultural shift for institution
How do systems of measurement, whether historic or recent, affect our practices as faculty?
Knowledge Scarcity Knowledge Abundance
Thatâs Not Rigor
Knowledge Abundance/Prestige Economy Audio
There's a quote by Berlow from 1975 where talking about the idea of knowledge abundance and that it forces us to consider, um, educating in new ways because no longer is it enough just to kind of know and memorize all the things, but rather we must know how to synthesize that we must know what to do with them. And I think that to some extent as in the biggest picture science as a field scholars, prestige
Um, but the prestige economy of scholarship, what counts at that tacit, implicit level that people almost never talk about is still premised in scarcity. It's still premised in a paperless economy. It's still premised in a world were to know was what differentiated the scholar from any of the other potential life, proverbs that any of us could have been on. And if we're going to actually, this is my belief, if we are going to actually a continue to be funded as a field, particularly in sort of the, the fraught times in which we live regarding public funding, um, and even private funding around higher education. If we're going to be able to make a value proposition for the work we do to the world, um, then we need to be able to communicate that outside of our own closed circles. We need to be able to communicate the value of scholarship to Publix and continuing to hang on to the prestige economy that we inherited, that values the traditional academic publishing system.
âI am in support of the reasons behind peer review in the sense that they stand for. I'm making a piece of work open and public to a limited audience of peers with different knowledge sets so that you can try to ensure that your processes are legitimate, um, that you know, there are not major sort of oversights or issues. I see peer review as a very formalized version of the sober second thought. I'm and a way of making our work better, but I think it's important to look at peer review as a technical system as well.â
Sober second thought, Peer Review Model
And there's a lot of dehumanization that happens in that and some of the dehumanization that we see in online comments, um, gets perpetuated in the process of peer review. And I don't think that's rigor. I'm now at the same time, not again, not everything should be done necessarily openly, but I'm a fan of the model of opening up peer review, potentially keeping elements of the process open to some clothes input, particularly reviewers flag something. But I've been reviewed openly and closely and the most part when people are trying to speak to you in a didactic way as if you are a writer that
if you in taking it in, taking advantage of what the digital makes possible, right? Of some of the speed of communications, of some of the complexity and hyperlinking of communications. If you also then take advantage and build in to scholarly communications, the human connection that is part of or possible within participatory digital, um, practices. Then you actually are contributing to a positive direction for scholarship. Scholarship is supposed to be founded on peer sharing and peer learning and communications, um, of knowledge. Right? And I don't think we make knowledge better by fully humanizing it from the people communicating it. So I don't see why we can't do good peer review in adopted more open, more digital ways.
the provost of the college asked to help develop a copyright policy for the college. Now I wasn't it, I'm not a lawyer. Um, and at first glance it seems like the unusual request for an English professor, um, but I had been studying copyright and my graduate work and my dissertation where in the eighteenth century and eighteenth centuries when copyright was invented by the British and then reinvented by the United States. So I felt some intellectual connection and I dove deeply into copyright law, copyright theory, which is endlessly fascinating. I mean, it has all kinds of terrific implications and connections with all kinds of issues from postmodernism to how we think about creativity to economics.
I mean, it's a very, very deep topic and uh, end up publishing on this and my colleagues looked at this a bit of scans because that was not quite what they thought I should be devoting my time to. So it's interesting the request would come from the provost or the top of the food chain if you will, um, and immediate in part through my work, your technology and the library. Uh, and then it kind of would've worked my traditional expectations. Um, so that was something which I, I had to rein in. The high point in this for me was interviewing the great copyrights scholar and lawyer, uh, Lawrence Lessig in publishing on that, getting a lot of attention for it. Um, but I, I had to kind of tamp that down to negotiate and balanced back and forth what was between different levels of expectation, different forums.
literature often sees itself as the domain of text and up until recently as tended to resist the historical inclusion of text with other media to me. So you can go back and think about hieroglyphs. She could think about comic books, you could think about illuminated or illustrated books. There are many examples in literature tends to even now tendency itself as Alphanumeric as a black and white, a letter letters on a blank page. Um, and so my experiments in multimedia, my research multimedia didn't always make people happy. Uh, I remember one professor saying that, uh, he was important to think of William Blake is a writer and not as a printmaker even though his, his graphic work is world famous and world renowned, um, and another professor told me that, uh, he thought Blake was a terrible artist. They want to use his material and they, these are small instances, but in many ways they are the kind of arguments that you have within the discipline as to what we consider valuable study and what we don't.
It was, I think peer review is a, is a, is a key theme that we don't want to lose sight of a and it's important to remember that a peer review is a key part of the academic, what we're talking about that's not always understood in part because there is residual sense that if it's online, it's not the pure reviewed, which is no longer true. It hasn't been true for awhile, but the census out there, I'm also the sense that if it's digital it must be lower quality, which isn't necessarily true, especially since more and more often people experience scholarship through digital forms, be it a Ebook for a monograph or pdf or he reserves. Um, I think, I think it's important to remember that, that the apparatus of faculty working with each other, the faculty correcting each other, advising each other, arguing with each other, pushing back, creating rivals, schools.
That's all happening. Uh, and it's important for us to join it, not invent it because it's already there. Um, I think the pure review aspect is, is definitely live in. The other thing is there's the informal side of it. What some librarians called the gray literature side. That is we have people writing monographs, we have people writing chapters in peer reviewed books. People were writing peer reviewed articles, yes, but we also have people publishing conference proceedings. We have people publishing their thoughts as blog posts or is extensive comments and lungs. We have people sharing their professional thongs via twitter, via podcast, via youtube, via pinterest. We have this huge informal, uh, aspect of professional development and scholarly communication, which weirdly is enormously influential and doesn't get a lot of attention, respect.
So we now have a good body of scholarship that we can point to and argue with and resist of course being scholarship. Um, but that's a key part that it isn't 1995 now. It's where a quarter, almost a quarter of the way, the 20 first century. We've been doing this for awhile. We can now draw on practices in terms of scholarship. The second thing is to keep in mind boyers admonition that we should develop a scholarship of teaching. And so I was able to research, study and write about my experiments, uh, of teaching with technology.
And I think that is a, an under appreciated and very, very powerful field. Uh, I think with practical benefits as well as intellectual benefits mean it's one thing to talk about. All right, I want to use podcasts or whatever in my class. I'm curious about what buttons to press and what permissions to do. Okay, that's, that's important. Um, we, and that's where educational technologist for instructional designers come in, but then we also have to think about what does it mean intellectually? So what is the role of audio when we are talking about students' voices, what does it mean to combine the asynchronous product of a single audio file into say, the synchronous live classroom or the asynchronous classes as experienced between classic articles? Um, I mean these are the intellectual questions that we need scholarship to address and work with and it's been happening. We have a body of scholarship on this, but I don't think it gets nearly enough, um, respect and we need to produce more of it.
So, I mean, that's a, that's a second level. A third is to think strategically for smaller institutions or for smaller units within larger institutions. I think easier now than it was two years ago. And it's for perverse reason. The perverse reason is the, uh, the election of trump and the fear about fake news that has brought to mind in, to everyone's mind, uh, the complexity of the digital world. It's potential harms, challenges as well as opportunities and it's brought to mind that we as academics have to think hard about what does it mean to inhabit a digital environment and what does it mean to teach our students that this is no longer something that, that, uh, is solely the providence providence of librarians, for example, as it was with the blue graphic instruction. It's not just the providence of the handful of, of outlier faculty. This is dustin that belongs to everyone and I think that that's a major challenge for us and it's one that we can't meet by declaring ourselves luddites and avoiding the question. I think it's one that we have to engage with fully as academia.
 This is vital to the point about what we are expected to do and how to draw value out of that
manner in which we address scholarship and we recognize scholarship follows a very specific path because it was ordained when you and I imagine would argue that it wasn't hard and it was set that way at some point and much like we can't just say in space.
If we were to travel up there, we need to think about this differently. Why, how do we address that? How do we start to work to change those cultures where rigor of a product is based on peer review in that very myopic lens? Well, you hit on a lot in math, but I love that when you've had a bit of a Freudian slip over that when you talked about teaching research and service and teaching, you said 10 years, which is the sort of elephant in the room over there. Um, so we can leave that in. That's perfect. Okay. Invite that in. And so, uh, you look at a place like the University of British Columbia since you're in Vancouver, that's the big sort of r one research institution in this province. Uh, and that's a space where they're not interested in copying what other people are doing. They in symphony that you've invested in, in Moocs, a sort of big brand projects, all of this stuff.
Um, but then the math department, the physics department really invested in, in, in our, not just in terms of adopting open textbook but developing resources to suit the context. Of course they've got quite a reaction, right? There's a physic faculty member I know who walked into his class at the beginning of the show, 400 students in this electric theater stood up and gave him a standing ovation because of the cost savings. That's when you realized, Oh, this is maybe important actually. Um, but that's not why the department embraced interested. They embraced it for, for, for the reason, for the sort of, I'm a fit for their teaching, for what they could do and of course, what they could provide in the way of expertise. But as the, as the math department, Physics Department and lots of other people at UBC really started taking this on, then the students start speaking up and about a year ago, uh, the Senate at UBC past approved a change in policy.
Uh, so when it comes to the tenure promotion policy, particularly for the teaching stream, there's now a, the creation and adaptation of what we are is recognized for tenure and promotion at UBC. So, and that's an institution with probably the mostly was a bureaucracy, uh, and the most sort of harking back to all the traditions versus an institution like mine that's smaller, much younger and nimble in the way of a pedagogy and pedagogical innovation and they've managed to change this grand old process. So I have quite a lot of hope. I don't think UBC is going to be the last one to do this. Uh, I think different places, uh, institutions come to open for different things. But then the challenge of course is not just being lip service to questions of innovation, um, and, but actually structuring the institution in people's workplaces so that they can actually do it.
Not just a, I mean you'll always have the people who are at the leading edge of the pencil, I, they'll innovate not just without support, but sometimes despite active opposition, you'll have people who will follow them, who will see the proof of concept and realize this is actually a great and I can follow this lead, but most people are in the middle of the wood of the pencil right there. They would do it if it was easy and set up and they didn't have to do extra work in the, at the time and yes, you have the races at the end which are always going to have the races at the end. And for me the beauty of open education is not just that it's about access, it's equal parts about agency. And
in the case of Commercial Textbook Authors, it's prestige that some remuneration, but it's more prestige that's associated with publishing. They want to serve the discipline. They want to serve their students. Very few commercial textbook authors get rich off this, although a few do certainly, um, uh, but at the same thing with publishing where you routinely sign away the copyright of our own intellectual work, uh, to commercial publishers for no particular reason. I publicly funded research, so then our institutions themselves have to pay money to subscribe to databases. So my colleague next door can read my research. So they shared a moral foundation. They share this sort of strangeness of Not Morph Off Normative practice, but they are quite different. I think there are a, you know, real open access journals that are real open access that are not. I'm not sort of ransom access that are not, uh, not demanding a, you know, a high article processing fees that certainly are not a, a vanity journals or predatory journals.
I wouldn't even refer to those as open access journals. That's just sort of rubbish on the Internet that is part of the rubbish on the Internet, um, but that are really wonderful open access journals. And I think as people realize, uh, not just in terms of, of a rigor of being in the same, um, editorial boards off, let's say the international journal of wellbeing would be a really good example in my field. Have a really high quality open access journal that is really open access with a wonderful editorial board. Same Level of rigor, right? But the difference is everyone can access it. So now it's not that you have the privilege that the privileged to have access to the latest cutting edge research. Even in terms of applying it to their context, nope. Everyone has access to it immediately. So from an r one institutions point of view, if you want to look at impact, what greater impact than having more people read your work, but somehow of course we have this warped mentality that if we publish a in the least accessible channels and right in the least accessible style, somehow that's prestigious, but I think that definition is changing and I think as, as, um, as academics as we start to realize the value of not just, uh, you know, speaking to our colleagues at professional conferences that each of us has spent $2,000 to attend, but that we also communicate to the public, uh, that we, that we do both of these jobs, uh, that, that, that impact is measured not just in terms of how few people can access your work, but how many.
Um, so I think for post and people you have an opportunity to shape the narrative, the discussion within your discipline, but even for early career folks put your pre print in an open repository and make it accessible, right? You will realize how many people are reading your work because now they can access the full pdf when they find your article in Google scholar and not just a brief citation with the American psychological association. So you realize that the discipline will realize that. Um, so I think, uh, if it doesn't have to be a wholesale shift, it doesn't have to be a radical shift. There are easy ways to move in the direction of openness without compromising any of your ideals. And so at this point it's really about raising awareness and sort of shedding light on the many ways in which people can practice in this space.
I think ultimately the goals of openness, whether it's open access, publishing, open education, or frankly open science are the same, right? It is about access, it is about supporting collaboration, transparency. And Rigor, right? It's very difficult when thousands of people can see your work, uh, that has been peer viewed through a proper editorial board to hide, to get away with something. Openness exposes floors. I can't engage in questionable research practices like p hacking or withholding disconfirming data or hypothesizing after the results are known. If I have pre registered my hypothesis, if I put my data in an open repository, right. If I'm, if I've shared my research materials because then I'm supporting a reproducibility within my discipline. So I guess what I'm trying to say is the goals are the same but openness is a bit of an accelerant over here. And so that's why open science is better science.
Open education is frightening to many people because I don't like it necessarily when my colleague pops in for the peer review of my teaching. I don't think that particular lecture, which I know about in advance is representative of every other lecture I will give that semester because I know what's on the line with that site visit. But why right. Is it because I'm afraid of being found out? Is it because I'm afraid my secret sauce will be stolen somehow? Like there's all sorts of fears, legitimate fears that faculty sometimes having an illegitimate fields, their faculty sometimes have, but I think if we reflect on what is the goal of scholarship, what is the goal of science, what is the goal of education? We will realize that openness supports those goals and the batteries are the structural barriers that constrain you into normative practice. And so I think once that realization hits the red pill has already been taken
I'm certainly using it as an opportunity to talk about, uh, the power of openness. So I think it's a lovely. If they already realize that everyone can edit wikipedia, that's wonderful. Then I would have that conversation to say, did you know, for example, that are almost 9,000 articles in wikipedia related to psychology topics? Did you know that only two thirds of them have been peer reviewed by Wikipedia is peer review standards, which are not mine, and did you know that only 10 percent of those articles are considered good articles by Wikipedia, not by me. Right? So if you're concerned about quality, you're not wrong.
Right? But let's talk then as colleagues about why are we then continuing to bury our heads in the sand. We know that wikipedia is the first port of call for our students. We know it's the first port of call, frankly, for faculty in many cases, and who's better position to fix this? Right? Imagine that a student of yours produces something, writes a paragraph that's going to be read by thousands of more people than will ever read a peer reviewed article that you publish, right? There's a humility in that, but there's power in that. So I think there's a conversation about pedagogy to be had. There's a conversation that, that sort of clarifies the distinction between predatory journals and open access journals and what we want to do with our work. What is the purpose of this work? Even if you're doing basic research, what is your ultimate goal? What do you, what do you, what kind of impact do you want this to have? But ultimately, you know, having them understand that, that this is a movement that is about agency, um, and they have the authority to make the decision and the right to, um, and I respect that. So I think that's an opportunity in itself