The Ed Techie

Ten digital scholarship questions for researchers

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/elycefeliz/3262326159/>

In my talk the other day for the Change MOOC, and in my book, I argue that digital scholarship has the potential to alter the way we conduct research, or at least to add some new tools to the toolbox.

Now checklists should be treated with even more caution than a finding that 3D improves learning, so take this as some things to think about rather than a definite checklist you can submit to your research funder. I'd be interested to hear of other suggestions, and also whether this is all stuff people are doing anyway. My feeling is that when it comes to writing research proposals we're all locked into a set of existing behaviours, and more significantly, the process is so arduous that you focus on surviving the process itself and not on thinking beyond it. In other words if the research funders aren't asking for it, we don't consider it. But if we (and by we, I mean researchers) want to take ownership of our own practice, then maybe we should.

So here's my list of digital scholarship type stuff to consider for your project:

1. Do you have an open access publishing policy for the outputs of the project?
2. Will you make the data openly available, or is some of it not appropriate to do so? If so, where will you put it?
3. Will there be one main individual in charge of social media communication or is it just distributed across the group?
4. Will you have specific twitter/blog/youtube accounts for the project or do individuals in the project have a high online reputation it would be better to utilise?
5. How will you incorporate analytics into the project? Do you expect to get a certain number of views, dwell time, global distribution, etc on a main site?
6. What media will you use? For example, will you create a 'trailer' video for the project and an overview of the findings?
7. How will you archive discussion around the research, eg twitter hashtag conversations?
8. Will you provide a curation service, eg a Scoop-It page of relevant resources as you go along?
9. Are there new methodologies you will employ, eg crowdsourcing?
10. Is there a planned release for findings throughout the project? Will any aspects be not open for dissemination eg via twitter or blogs?

I'll stop there because ten is a nice number.

Digital scholarship - conclusions

[This is for the Change11 MOOC]

Digital scholarship - Conclusions

I hope to add to this as the week progresses as it should arise from our discussions.

Some thoughts from my perspective are to revisit the four themes I mentioned in the introduction:

• Alternatives - ultimately I suspect this, combined with the impact argument, will be significant for digital scholarship. If academics find they can achieve the same, or better, results through alternative means (which may often be quicker), then they will vote with their actions.
• Impact - I suspect that research funders may play a significant role here, just as they did with open access publishing. They want the maximum impact for their funding money, and if digital scholarship methods provide this then they will encourage (or even mandate) them. Practice will follow money then. In addition one should not underestimate the role of ego - if academics begin to get better impact because of their online videos or presentation, that becomes a strong driving force to engage.
• Openness - this is an interesting area, and in some respects it is already becoming a cliche (for example read these posts from David Wiley: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1934#more-1934and http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1800) Openness may yet become another term to be co-opted by commercial providers. But even so, it is the easy, low-threshold ability to share content that is driving much of the change in academic practice.
• Tension - I think we should view the current period as one of creative tension, a period when much is open to change. In this respect it is both an uncertain and an exciting time to be involved in education.

 

Criticisms of digital scholarship

[This is for the Change11 MOOC]

Criticisms of Digital Scholarship

Although I have tried to avoid some of the more rabid evangelism one often encounters with new technology, it is fair to say that in general I regard digital scholarship as an improving force in scholarly practice, and that it provides ways of working that are often an improvement on existing methods. But it is not without its drawbacks and areas of concerns. In this section we will look at some of these, and consider which ones have the greatest significance and validity.

Action
Read Weller Chap 13: http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/chapter-ba-9781849666275-chapter-013.xml
Watch Turkle Alone Together Ted talk: 

 
Watch Lanier You are Not a Gadget:

 


Consider:

• It is worth considering the nature and tone of some of these criticisms, often based on anecdotes and lacking in evidence. Is this simply a case of the evidence not existing yet, or does it reveal something about the nature of the discussion?
• Of the criticisms listed which ones do you feel are most significant?
• Beyond the ones I’ve listed do you think there are other areas of serious concern which should give us pause to reflect in the adoption of digital scholarship approaches?

Digital scholarship and research

[This is for the Change11 MOOC]

Digital Scholarship and Research

You can choose to complete this section, or the alternative one on Digital Scholarship and Teaching (or both).

New technologies and the approaches that being digital, networked and open allows has great potential for research. New tools are available, new methodologies and a variety of ways in which research findings can be disseminated now exist. Yet this area perhaps exemplifies the tension in digital scholarship most vividly. There have been many studies recently looking at researcher’s use of new technology, and the results generally reveal a cautious picture of adoption.

Action: 
Read Weller Chap 5: http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/chapter-ba-9781849666275-chapter-005.xml;jsessionid=543AAE770E2327FAFF05AA94554E28FE
Read James et al (2009) Lives and technologies of early career researchers (or at least some of it) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/earlycareerresearchersstudy.aspx
Look at Terry Anderson’s ALT-C keynote talk: Look at Terry Anderson’s slideshare:

 

Terry Anderson Alt C Final

View more presentations from terrya

Consider:

• Have you had experience of the tension mentioned?
• Are the reservations around quality and the role of peer-review justified?
• What are the longer term implications for how we conduct, and disseminate research?

 

Digital scholarship and teaching

[This is for the Change11 MOOC]

Digital Scholarship and Teaching

You can choose to complete this section, or the alternative one on Digital Scholarship and Teaching (or both).

Arguably, teaching is the area where we will see the biggest, and most visible, change as a result of digital scholarship. Even in a conventional lecture setting, students now have access to a vast range of information sources, so the notion of the lecturer as the font of knowledge has disappeared. During any given lecture a student may well be watching a world expert talk on the same subject via iTunesU. Even this small change has profound implications for what it means to be a lecturer and the role of universities. If we add in factors such as open education, the impact of social networks, the easy distribution of digital content, the blurring of formal and informal education, learner analytics, etc then the nature of teaching begins to look very different than it did even ten years ago.
This is a broad topic, and in my book I only focus on one particular aspect, namely what is the impact of abundant content on the nature of teaching. I think this provides a reasonable model for considering other factors however.

Action
Read Weller Chapter  8:http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/chapter-ba-9781849666275-chapter-008.xml;jsessionid=543AAE770E2327FAFF05AA94554E28FE
View the contributions to Dave and George’s course on the Future of Education:http://edfutures.com/contributions

Consider:

• How might abundance impact upon teaching you are aware of?
• This focused only on abundance as one implication of digital scholarship, what other impacts can you think of?
• If we were to consider the impact of social networks on teaching, suggest four ways in which it might (or is already) influence current approaches as it becomes more embedded in practice.

What is digital scholarship? (#change11)

(this is content for the Change11 MOOC)

What is digital scholarship?

This is usually the first question people ask when I mention the subject, or rather ‘what do YOU mean by digital scholarship?’. In this section we’ll look at the term, but I should issue a warning - we may not arrive at a clean definition, and that is probably okay. Many years ago I was part of the initial wave of educational technologists who were interested in learning objects. After three years, I don’t think they had arrived at a satisfactory definition of what constituted a learning object, and indeed the search for such a definition began to stagnate the topic as a whole.

So, while a definition is useful, I would warn against becoming too mired in discussing the subtle nuances of different interpretations.

Action:
Read Weller Chap 1http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/acknowledgements-ba-9781849666275-0000023.xml
Read Boyer Scholarship Reconsidered, chapter 2 https://depts.washington.edu/gs630/Spring/Boyer.pdf
Watch YouTube vid:

 

Consider:

• Is digital scholarship a useful and practical term?
• Is Boyer’s classification a useful means of considering digital scholarship?
• What would your definition be?

 

Digital scholarship - introduction

[This is for the Change 11 MOOC]

Digital Scholarship - Introduction

Hello, and welcome to my week of the Change MOOC. This week is concerned with the theme of digital scholarship. If you’re not sure what that means, then don’t worry, we’ll explore that in the next section, but a rough definition might be ‘changes in academic practice as a result of new technology’.
Here is a short video introduction from me:
 

As I mention in the video, the week is largely based around a book I’ve just published, called The Digital Scholar. This was published by Bloomsbury, but is available as a free open access book, under a Creative Commons license here: http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/book-ba-9781849666275.xml

So the book itself is an example of digital scholarship, and one aspect we might like to consider is the change in the nature of publishing and knowledge dissemination.

As you go through the week, I’d like you to bear in mind the four themes I mention in the video, which I feel are the interesting areas for discussion around digital scholarship. These are:

• Alternatives - often people on both sides of the digital scholarship argument portray it as an either/or scenario, so you may hear detractors saying ‘I don’t want everything to be reduced to a tweet, I think books are still important’, or evangelists proclaiming that ‘publishing is dead, video is king now.’. I would suggest that what digital scholarship provides us with is a richer set of alternatives, where previously we may have had no choice.
• Impact - this is the real argument in favour of digital scholarship. What academics, universities and research funders really want is for their work to have impact. Arguably many of the new forms of media, and particularly when mediated through an extensive social network, allow for greater impact than traditional scholarly practices. Questions we might ask include: How might we measure these reliably? What skills do they require to foster? Are they as reliable and robust as other methods?
• Openness - in the next section, I suggest that ‘digital scholarship’ is really a shorthand for digital, networked and open. Arguably it is the last component that is most significant. Openness in practice - whether it is sharing ideas via blogs, open courses, open educational resources, open access publishing or open data - is becoming a default approach for many academics (and this course is an example). This has profound implications on practice, business models, identity and the role of sectors, which we are only beginning to appreciate.
• Tension - there exists a tension currently between the undoubted potential of many digital scholarship approaches and the context which it resides within. So we simultaneously have pockets of marvellous innovation, and at the same time, a markedly conservative, resistant attitude from many institutions, which is often manifest in the how digital scholarship is recognised or encouraged.

So those represent the main themes of the week. The structure is as follows:

What is digital scholarship - an initial look at the field and the term
Research or teaching - You can then choose to look at how digital scholarship is affecting research or teaching (or both if you have the time).
Synchronous session - this is scheduled for Wednesday 28th at 5pm UK time. The intention is for this to be an open session to discuss any of the issues, but there will be some prompts also.
Criticisms of digital scholarship - we will then look at some of the areas of concern around digital scholarship
Conclusions

Output - at the end of the week I would like you to produce a very brief digital artefact, in the form of a blog post, YouTube video, Slideshare presentation, etc. It should address the following question: “what impact has digital scholarship had on your practice and what difficulties have you encountered?”
Please upload it to your own account (using whichever service you prefer) and tag it with #change11digschol. We will aggregate these together so that we collectively gather a picture of digital scholarship at the current time. It is my hope that this is a useful resource for all of us.

I hope you enjoy the week, and I look forward to some interesting discussions.

 

What are the values in a MOOC?

[MOOCs should be this kind of fun]

So this week I am coordinating the topic over at George, Dave and Stephen's Change MOOC (you can see my activities here). The topic is, inevitably, digital scholarship. Preparing for it has set me thinking about what the educator and the learners get from MOOCs and how they differ from formal courses. 

At this point, ladies and gentlemen, I would like you to take out your violins - I have a very full workload. I know, you feel my pain. The trouble with this is that it means any of this MOOC stuff is really done at the fringes of my time. There's that bid to put together before the deadline, the meetings to attend, the report to complete, the thesis to read, the chapter to write. So when I said 'yeah, I'll do the MOOC' six months ago, I didn't actually block out any space for it. And this is one of the inevitable problems about doing stuff for free - the paying job takes priority.

Alan calls me out for a boring video, but this is only part of it. I wanted to be more radical in terms of pedagogy and technology use than I ended up being in my week. The problem is this: Innovation takes time. So when you don't have any time you tend to fall back on what you know. (BTW - I think Alan's wrong about that particular video - a friendly, low production talking head works quite well as a 'hello and welcome' framing and helps connect the learner with the educator, but he is right in general, I want to create a nice video that accompanies my book and explores the issues).

Now, maybe this is ok. For a start, with a different person running every week learners in the MOOC might soon get innovation and technology fatigue. But more significantly I view MOOCs in a different way to conventional courses. I see them more as a focal point for bringing people together to discuss the topics. They are not there to teach. It is a shame though because the point of doing a MOOC for me as an educator is that they provide a space to experiment in a way that may not be acceptable with paying students, so I don't feel as though I used this opportunity to its full potential.

In terms of preparing for this MOOC, I probably spent about a day writing my material. Now, I could argue that I could get away with this because I'd spent months previously writing the book, which forms the basis of the course. And I'll come in for the live session on Wednesday and respond to any queries on Twitter. Is that enough? If I were writing an OU course I'd put more effort into the production. So am I short-changing the MOOC learners? 

So here's my question to myself, and maybe to you:

Should I participate in running MOOCs/open sessions if I can't give them the same time I would my day job, or is it an acceptable pay-off for them being free and open that I give less? 

And also:

What are the learner's expectations and what is their experience like?

Open as in... doors, arms, ended?

With a fanfare and much waving of pompoms, I can announce that the open access version of my book is now online, via the good people at Bloomsbury Academic. It is available online in plain HTML format, broken down by chapters. I'm excited about this because now I can point people at it and pass it around freely. 

A couple of people have requested other formats, eg epub, pdf, etc. I could do these, but my feeling is that what's significant is the Creative Commons Non-Commercial licence. If anyone wants to take the HTML version and create an Egyptian hieroglyphics version delivered via 1988 version of HyperCard - well, they can.

In open source communities they often make the distinction of free as in free speech (meaning that you have freedom to alter the code), and free as in beer (meaning gratis, zero cost). This set me thinking - I wonder what the open in open access means: 

• open as in arms - it is welcoming, friendly even, particularly given the network around it (eg you can twitter me and tell me it's rubbish), it is not a product in a vacuum.
• open as in doors - you are invited in, like an open door policy to look around
• open as in ended - this is not to say I have an ongoing commitment to update it, but that the possibilities of the licence allow it to be open ended in terms of format

One I'm not sure about is whether it is open as in minded - it is not a co-constructed text, a wiki-book, it is still a one to many broadcast model. Which is appropriate sometimes, I want to hear what, say Clay Shirky, has to say on a subject, not 10,000 people around him, but I wonder if there is more that can be done around the open-minded angle.

On that note I am running a week of the Siemens/Downes/Cormier MOOC extravaganza, starting 26th September, and I'll be using my book as the basis. So maybe this is a way of being open-minded, constructing a course, or event, around the open access version so it can be discussed and interpreted.To this end I would like people to vote on the topics we'll cover in the week - choose three from this list.  Anyway, I hope you can join in the course, or failing that, get a chance to check out the OA version of the book.

Meanwhile here is Elbow singing Open Arms, which I think is all about open access publishing...

 

For-profits - the revenge of teaching?

<Image by Kaptain Kobold http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaptainkobold/98688066/>

There is some anxiety in the UK at the moment at the threat posed from for-profit universities. The concern is that with high student fees, cost becomes an issue, and so the market is ripe for commercial providers to enter and undercut the incumbents.

We can all think why this might be detrimental to higher education and society in general. Courses would be stripped back to only the profitable elements, other functions of universities might disappear, it increases the notion of education as commodity, etc.

I wouldn't disagree with any of these concerns, and this should not be read as a defence of for-profits. But there is also a part of me that wonders if this isn't a result of universities and academics undervaluing teaching as a scholarly function. When Boyer performed his analysis of scholarly practice in 1990, it was partly to combat the perception that research was more highly valued. He argued that all four functions were of equal value. He stated then that

"Almost all colleges pay lip service to the triology of research, teaching and service, but... the three rarely are assigned equal merit.
Today, when we speak of being scholarly, it usually means having academic rank in a college or university and being engaged in research and publication."

However not much has changed. When it comes to promotion it is still research that is seen as carrying the most weight. As Harley et al put it put it:

"Tenure is a three-legged stool: service,teaching, and research, and the latter leg of the stool is much thicker and stronger than the other two." (pg 222)

But the income of teaching usually far outweighs that of research to a university - even a research intensive university. So in some respects the arrival of purely teaching focused universities and providers on these shores can be interpreted as an act of revenge after years of neglect. The trouble is the unis who really have prioritised teaching over the past 20 years may well be the ones most affected by the arrival of the for-profits, and the research focused Russell group unis will probably carry on regardless.

But maybe the moral is hell hath no fury like a scholarly function scorned.