Personal Blogs

The Digital Scholar (notes 2)

Revolution not imminent, significant trends are as far as it goes.

(More than a Model T Ford getting a lick of green paint, more akin to flight making the shift to jet propulsion?)

Something of a revolution in other sectors, from external agencies or bottom up.

Digitisation of content. Perfectly distribution.

Social networks and the easy distribution of content.

• Newspapers
• Music Industry

WPP near 20% drop in traditional advertising in papers.

Craig's list has double the traffic of the New York Times

Unbundling if newspaper advertising

Don't confuse function with form, we don't need newspapers, we need journalism. Shirky.

John Naughton

Think Ecologically

Think long term

JV Abandon voice in favour of large text, three to four words per line, like a TV autocue, the Kindle in my right hand typing with my left and skim reading rather faster.

See my scrapbook of images in Picasa Web, or put in Tumblr, or image favouring Wordpress layout.

VS industries based in ownership.

So music returns to the live concert,

Blurring of boundaries between sectors.

What Apple has over Microsoft and many others, is a passion sand vigour when it comes to design both of hardware and software.

So what's the equivalent for universities?

If they are the record company then they are redundant, let’s go for the author as artiste, even their free books to promote the live lecture?

Atoms, molecules and filters.

Google and an eBay for education?

• A community of learners
• Approved mentors
• Credits based on learning they can demonstrate

University Functions:

1. Teaching

2. Research

3. Dissemination

4. Outreach

5. Curation

· Change can be quick

· No assumptions are unassailable

· Form and function are different

· Boundaries are blurred.

· We can't wrap libraries and such like in cotton wool if their time is over.

· Global networks, unpredictable environments, rapid response.

The life experience of the university campus and college.

Resistance

Chapter 4

The Nature of Scholarship

Unsworth (2000)

Scholarly promotes:

· Discovering knowledge

· Adding layers

· Comparing

· Referencing and acknowledging

· Sampling

· Illustrating

· Representing

Palmer, Teffeau and Pirmann (2009)

• Searching (browsing)
• Collecting
• Reading
• Writing
• Collaborating

 

Boyer (1990)

Need to recruit to teach, not research.

'Knowledge is acquired through research, synthesis, practice and teaching'. Boyer (1990)

· Discovery

· Application

· Teaching

Favours humanities, lone scholars and a culture of 'possessive individualism'(Rosenzweig, 2007)

Isn't the term digital harking back to the 1990s? Should we not be talking about E-scholarship?

· Build

· Create tools to build and analyse

· New intellectual products

Borgman (2007)

'The Internet lies at the core of an advanced scholarly information infrastructure to facilitate distributed, data and information-intensive collaborative research'.

N.B. The sharing of data and data itself constitute knowledge capital, comparable with published articles

Changes in how scholars communicate, outputs and the networks they operate in.

Discovery or 'genesis research'

Datasets being more readily shared.

Data visualisation and information is beautiful.

New forms of journal publishing see the journal of Visualized Experiments. Jove.com

Academics as brand

Outreach and viral appeal ...when the right person tweets you.

Through openness of two kinds, sharing and being.

Chapter 5

TED Rapid innovation being driven by sharing. Anderson (2010)

Crowd accelerated innovation

X3

· Crowd

· Light

· Desire

Driven by observation, competition and being seen.

Research?

Using SlideShare?

n.b. Clarity & engagement

VS. Caution and hostility of the research community.

Inherent values and attitudes

Chapter 6

· Integration

· Cross-fertilisation of knowledge

· Wissenschaft

· Interdisciplinary

Publication associated with promotion and tenure.

Shaohui and Lihua (2008)

· Blogs as thought sharing.

· Non-linearity

· Criticalness and multivariate collision

(JV but only if people become alerted to it or familiar with its content)

Loic Le Meur (2005)

· Early sharing

· Input from others

· Launching collaborative projects impossible to do alone

· Gathering content continually from many sources

· Code of blogging practice? DISAGREE

· Speed LESS IMPORTANT THAN FREQUENCY, RESPONSIVENESS.

Recognition DISAGREE WHY ELSE SO MANY ANONYMOUS?

Tricks can mean that blogs get traffic and readership because of SEO actions: key words, tags, links, subscriptions, PPC.

The personal mix renders blogs interesting. MW

No, it is apposite disclosure or exposure, wit and pertinence.

E.g. John Cooke Rock and Business

REF: Shaohui, W. & Lihua, M. (2008), The Application of Blog in Modern Education'. Proceedings of CSSE 08,4:1083-1085

· Conferences

· Trending

· Retweets

To amplify, entertain, comment, visibility, validation, loyalty, friendship,

LL tail models when there is sufficient content for the tail.

Wasted time:

· Meetings

· Lectures

Or share. Blog posts

Generating content as a by-product of what is done anyway:

• Keeping notes
• Working up ideas

Chapter 9

Openness in education

A set of characteristics of the open scholar.

Sharing

· Frictionless

· Quick

· Content sharing

Higher citation impact of open articles of 36% to 172%

Networking = crowd sourcing

Lazy web = access to experts

Reciprocity is key

The relationship between a blogger and a reader is maintained if the blogger provides interesting and regular updates.

An economy of reciprocity

The more you give online that is of value to those in your network then the more 'credit' you establish.

Sarah Horrigan (2009) lists Twitter etiquette that could be ... Advice on establishing reciprocity.

· Fill in your profile

· Picture please

· Not a private club

· Participate

· Update

· Learn the importance of @ and 'd'.

· Retweet selectively

Nowak and Roche (2007)

Upstream reciprocity

A recipient of an act of kindness is more likely to help others.

Openness the sine qua non

· Sharing

· Reciprocity

GSA. Centralise LMSs:

David Wiley

Michael Wesch

Larry Lessor

Where Academics get stuck - identity and status.

Zittrain (2008) 'generatively' 'a system's capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences'.

Low product OERs encourages further participation. The implicit message in these OERs is that the consumer can become a producer - they are an invitation to participate precisely because of their low quality.

KEY

In educational terms it may be that both (big OERs and little OERs) have a role to play within a learning context or course. Learners may want to feel the reassurance of the quality brand material for core content, but they may also want a mixture of the more social, participatory media that encourages them to contribute'.

Joshua Bell playing on the underground story.

Top violinist using an instrument worth 3.5 million dollars.

Context of big OER compared to little.

Naive to think putting stuff onto YouTube will get it noticed.