The Digital Scholar revisited
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The document examines how digital technologies have impacted scholarly practices since 2011 and revisits Boyer's framework for scholarship. It identifies 5 main themes in how digital scholarship has developed: 1) Mainstreaming of digital scholarship in new methods and open data/science. 2) Shift to open in open access policies, data/science. 3) Policy development in open access policies and funding. 4) Formation of network identity through social media and online profiles. 5) Criticality of digital scholarship through pressures to develop online presence and data/findings being used elsewhere. It concludes that much remains unchanged but digital scholarship is gradually being accepted through an iterative dialogue between traditional and digital approaches.
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The Digital Scholar revisited
- 1. Revisiting the Digital Scholar Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash
- 2. 2011 http://bit.ly/digscholarbook FREE! Examined the impact of digital, networked technologies on scholarly practice
- 3. Boyer’s framework http://connectivism.madeleinebrookes.com/supporting-scholarship-through-blogging/
- 4. Proctor, Williams and Stewart (2010) ‘frequent or intensive use is rare, and some researchers regard blogs, wikis and other novel forms of communication as a waste of time or even dangerous’ Photo by Goh Rhy Yan on Unsplash
- 5. Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash So, what’s changed since 2011?
- 6. Photo by Takahiro Sakamoto on Unsplash 5 main themes (and some conclusions)
- 7. Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash Mainstreaming of digital scholarship
- 8. Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash Shift to open
- 9. Photo by Elliott Stallion on Unsplash Policy development
- 10. Photo by Liam Seskis on Unsplash Network identity
- 11. Photo by Jerry Kiesewetter on Unsplash Criticality of digital scholarship
- 12. Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash Revisiting Boyer
- 13. Some examples Mainstream Open Policy Identity Criticality Discovery New methods, eg data vis Open data, science Open access policies Use of social media to disseminate Pressures to develop online profile Integration Interdisciplinary recognition Mixing data sets Funding for interdisciplinary work Hashtags, conferences outside of domain Data used elsewhere, social media context Application Public engagement online Sharing open resources Impact policy Personal brand Targeting individuals, online abuse Teaching Blended, online at most unis MOOCs, OER OER EU policy Digital literacies Analytics, MOOC problems
- 14. Photo by Marcos Luiz Photograph on Unsplash Conclusions
- 15. Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash Much is unchanged
- 16. Photo by Courtney Prather on Unsplash Gradual acceptance
- 17. Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash Iterative dialogue between traditional and digital scholarship
- 18. Photo by jens johnsson on Unsplash ‘What we urgently need today is a more inclusive view of what it means to be a scholar’ - Boyer
- 19. All photos https://unsplash.com/ CC0
Editor's Notes
- Getting two books mashed together – wrote digital scholar in 2011 and was very much advocacy then, but interesting to think what has changed
- One way of thinking about the impact of digital scholarship is to consider what is it that universities do. My approach was to take the 1990 work of Boyer who analysed the work of several thousand scholars and categorised their activity in four functions: Discovery, Integration, Application and Teaching. So I’m going to consider one flavour or each of these to just demonstrate the impact of digital scholarship, but these are not the only impacts
- Not only is it no longer unusual to meet an academic with a blog or a Twitter account, but online identity is now seen as a central part of what it means to be an academic. Research projects will make use of Twitter accounts to both disseminate findings and recruit subjects, online digital databases now form part of a researcher’s toolkit and tools for analyzing social media, VLE and geo data have generated new insights and approaches. In teaching the advent of MOOCs may have been accompanied by hype but it also raised the profile of online education in general. This pervasiveness of digital provision across all universities is highlighted by findings such as a review of distance education universities globally by Qayyum & Zawacki-Richter (2017) who conclude that Online and distance education enrolments are strong and mainly growing Existing institutions are increasing their online and distance education offerings New institutions are offering online and distance education Similarly, when examining the use of online teaching at research intensive universities, Mapstone, Buitendijk & Wiberg (2014) find that academics are keen to embrace innovations that facilitate the mission of broadening understanding beyond the university, suggesting that ‘it is in the interests of RIUs to generate a full-scale digital strategy, in which MOOCs will be but one element.’
- In education ‘open’ has become a modifier for many terms, giving rise to open textbooks, open data, open pedagogy, open science and open educational practice. The increase in profile of open practice then underpins many of the subsequent themes, to the extent that open scholarship may in fact be a more descriptive term than digital scholarship Open access, MOOCs, OER, open data - Openness has seen large-scale recent developments becoming part of the mainstream to the extent that The Economist (2016) declared that open vs. closed has now replaced right vs. left in political discourse
- The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) tracks such policies at the funder, research organisation and multiple organisation level. It indicates that in 2011 (when the Digital Scholar was published) there were 387 such policies in total, compared with 887 at the end of 2017, in 68 different countries. Related to open access publication mandates are policies relating to open data, which state that, as with publications, data arising from publicly funded research projects should be openly available A European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (Redecker 2017) proposes that a key competence for all educators is ‘to effectively identify resources that best fit their learning objectives, learner group and teaching style, to structure the wealth of materials, establish connections and to modify, add on to and develop themselves digital resources to support their teaching. UNESCO made OER a central method for realising their Sustainable Development Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning, with the 2017 Ljubljana OER action plan (UNESCO 2017)
- Perhaps the area of digital scholarship that has seen the most growth, both in terms of practice and associated research, is that of networked, academic identity. Veletsianos & Kimmons, (2012) refer to Networked Participatory Scholarship (NPS) to encompass scholars’ use of social networks to ‘pursue, share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and further their scholarship’. Stewart (2016) notes that establishing a networked identity increases visibility for pre-tenure academics, and this increased network and impact offers some protection in a climate of precarious academic labour Costa (2013 pg 171) argues, stating ‘Higher Education Institutions are more likely to encourage conventional forms of publication than innovative approaches to research communication’. She also identifies that digital scholars adopt a ‘double gamers’ strategy whereby they slowly implement cultural changes to practice while simultaneously engaging in traditional practice to remain relevant within their institution (Costa 2016). However, researchers are also increasingly identifying the negative aspects of networked scholarship. Stewart (ibid) comments that ‘network platforms are increasingly recognised as sites of rampant misogyny, racism, and harassment’.
- This comes in different forms, but one prominent strand is suspicion about the claims of educational technology in general, and the role of software companies in particular. One of the consequences of digital scholarship and open practices entering the mainstream of education is that they become increasingly attractive routes for companies to enter the education market. Much of the narrative around digital scholarship is associated with change, which quickly becomes co-opted into broader agendas around commercialisation, commodification and massification of education