Academic Evolution

Scholarly Communications must be Mobile

Continuing my series on how scholarly communications must transform, I will argue here that scholarship must fit itself to mobile communications in order to be taken seriously in the future.

Of course traditional scholarship must be made available on hand-held devices, but more importantly, the full range of scholarly practices -- research, laboratory work, field work, presentations of findings, and publishing itself -- will all transform themselves in order to conform with the social and intellectual practices of ubiquitous, networked, interactive communication that mobile devices are enabling. The future of scholarship is literally in our hands, and the phone is ringing.

Scholarly Communications will Transform via Cybermetrics

Continuing my series on how scholarly communications must transform, I will argue here that scholarship is about to see "webometrics" or "cybermetrics" supplant traditional bibliometrics for gauging the impact of scholarship. But this is just the beginning. Cybermetrics applied to scholarship will revitalize traditional academic publishing and pave the way for new uses and genres of intellectual work. As scholars and their institutions begin to use cybermetrics they can enrich scholarly productivity and maximize the influence of their intellectual output.

The Impact Factor Factor
Impact is a big deal to scholars and their sponsors. Really big. The Impact Factor of the journal in which one publishes adds or subtracts value from one's publications. This algorithm is derived from a calculation based chiefly on the number of citations a publication generates. It has become a prominent determining factor in securing grants, academic posts, tenure, and advancement. And why not? Don't we want scholars to be making an impact?  With today's info glut, isn't it even more important to preserve and promote systems that help us to know what information should be given more authority?

I will first look into the history of Impact Factor and will claim that this early effort to grapple with information overload has improperly become institutionalized and is neither trustworthy nor adequate for today's information culture. Then I will open the discussion of what can or should be measured through cybermetrics with online scholarly communication. Academia has some very good places to go with its treasure trove of existing and ongoing scholarship; it can't get there by clinging to authority systems based on pre-Internet bibliometrics.

Western Civilization and the Digital World

Image by Gary Hayes via Flickr

What would you include in an undergraduate course on digital civilization -- a course beginning in the Renaissance and arriving at our current digitally-mediated state of communication, knowledge, and culture? Are there analogs to our digital world in the past? What authors or texts from history illuminate our present? What themes would you address? What fields of knowledge or cultural movements across the centuries have bearing on the digital now? If education itself is transforming, what's the recipe for teaching and learning both in and about the digital age? How would you structure such a course?

Faculty Perspectives on Open Educational Resources and Open Access

Below is the narrated version of the presentation I gave on 11-11-09 at the Association of Research Libraries Leadership Fellows Institute at Brigham Young University on the topic of "Faculty Perspectives on Open Educational Resources and Open Access."

I enjoyed putting together the Prezi presentation (about which I've blogged previously) because it truly helped me to think through the issues and to visualize these concepts for myself and for my audience. The public Prezi presentation (without narration) is available at Prezi.com, here, in case you'd like to use it yourself (or play with the great zooming and non-linear presenting features of Prezi).

Is Academia ready for Second Life?

I've been reading Tom Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life, an anthropologist's look at the most popular of the virtual worlds. I now know what AFK means ("away from keyboard") and a lot of other things, too, about this complex online environment and its cultures and mores.

I've spent a number of hours exploring Second Life, flying my avatar across digital landscapes that materialize as my bandwidth catches up. I've strolled through the arcades, been a bit puzzled by the Halloween party feeling of all the tricked out avatars and people typing to each other. I even used some of my free Linden dollars (the currency there) to buy a necklace for my avatar. I don't wear necklaces in real life, so this was stepping out a bit for me. I have been reluctant to engage in this demi-monde. Once, I landed on an idyllic little spot and strolled through a lovely house beside a stream. A woman avatar typed/shouted at me to get out. This was her land. What was I doing there? I didn't know. A bit embarrassed, and frustrated at not being able to figure how to create objects and buildings (that obviously so many have become so adept at), I left Second Life. I haven't been back for a long time.

Real Time Scholarship

As I write this post on my iPhone (waiting at the doctor's office), I'm interrupted regularly by the tweets coming from @ScholarlyComm -- reporting live at Columbia University during a conference on the Future of Learned Societies. I'm glad to be a virtual participant, especially since my institution decided against observing Open Access Week, and this is a very exciting time for changing how scholars disseminate their work and conduct their research.

I'm going to send @ScholarlyComm a direct message in a second, suggesting he/she use a hashtag like #openaccessweek to be sure other audiences who would be interested in this conference can join in as I am, via electronic means. As this Twitter reporter sends snippets along, I take a second to search online about the speaker and the learned society he's affiliated with. At my mobile computer (now in a parking lot in my car) I may in fact be getting more out of this than if I were in the room in New York. I combine my listening with casual research that links this speaker's or this Tweeter's interests with mine.

The Ultimate PowerPoint Replacement: Prezi

I've heard a lot of arguments about how PowerPoint is the end of civilization as we know it. I use it a lot, and with being able to share presentations on sites like Slideshare, what gives? Well, you owe it to yourself to check out a most creative and enjoyable new mode of presentation called "Prezi." It's a little more work than learning PowerPoint, but even after just an hour of tinkering, I can already tell this is going to be a tool that will help me conceptualize the information better and employ media more interestingly. Here's a quick look at one that I put together. This is a screencast that I talk through (thanks, ScreenJelly) but you might do better to access this Prezi presentation directly so you can try out the navigation tools yourself, or go ahead and check out others' more developed examples at the Prezi Showcase).

Scholarly Communications must be Integrated Into the Cyberinfrastructure

I last spoke about the need for scholarly communications to be syndicated in this series of posts on how scholarly communications must transform. In this post, I discuss the need for scholarship to be integrated into the cyberinfrastructure. 

"Cyberinfrastructure" is a mouthful, but a vital concept today. Scholars, librarians, and all stakeholders in academic knowledge production need to understand the concept of cyberinfrastructure and come to see the generation of scholarship as something participating within and building this emerging structure for learned communication.

Academic Networking with Twitter

Want to use Twitter to connect with other people sharing similar academic or research interests? Here's a 2 1/2 minute screencast in which I briefly explain one method. Can you suggest other ways, too? (By the way, I used the free screen capturing tool, "ScreenJelly" to create this video).

Scholarly Communications must be Syndicated

Image by Gideon Burton via Flickr

In my previous posts about how scholarly communications must transform, I've focused on ideas such as openness and standards compliance. This post focuses how and why scholarship of the digital age must be syndicated to be significant.

Syndication is associated with mass media like television or print journalism. But a revolutionary web standard has made it possible for almost any kind of content to be broadly distributed across diverse outlets. That standard is RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and it offers a superior method for disseminating scholarship than traditional publication.

Academic publishing is about more than dissemination, to be sure, but scholars would do well to understand this more flexible communications medium whose reach goes further than any top-tier academic or scientific journal.