Scholarly, Digital, Open: an impossible triangle?

Robin Goodfellow (forthcoming)Research in Learning Technology

Vol. 21, 2013

How can the traditions of scholarship, the principle of openness, and the new cultures of digitality be combined?

Is such a triangle even possible in theory?

the ‘public good’ of universities

(Calhoun 2006; Cowan et al. 2008)

University scholarship

Delft University Library: http://www.miragebookmark.ch/most-interesting-libraries.htm

(Benkler 2008:55)

Academic gatekeepers?

The Hamburg Convention of Professors – Max Liebermann 1906

a discourse of openness

• Open science and the ‘invisible college’• Open publishing and public engagement• The open and ‘participatory’ internet

A convergence of ‘digital’ and ‘open’

‘digital scholarship is more than just using information and communication technologies to research, teach and collaborate … it is embracing the open values, ideology and potential of technologies born of peer-to-peer networking and wiki ways of working in order to benefit both the academy and society. Digital scholarship can only have meaning if it marks a radical break in scholarship practices brought about through the possibilities enabled in new technologies. This break would encompass a more open form of scholarship’ (Pearce et al 2010).

..can the same ‘democratising’ principles that we seek to apply to our teaching online also be applied to Research and Scholarship?

some definitions…

‘Scholarship’ - a set of epistemological and ethical practices that underpin the social construction of an enduring record of objectively validated knowledge

Boyer 1990, Andresen 2000, Borgman 2007

some definitions…

‘Digitality’ - the affordances of digital technologies

AND the social conditions of living, working, and interacting etc. that digital technologies construct for us, through their ubiquity and agencies

boyd 2010, Jones 2013, Latour 2005, Savage et al. 2010, Palmer and Cragin 2008

some definitions…

‘Openness’ - a philosophy and set of practices• the property of accessibility without

qualification criteria (logistical, financial, credentialing etc.)

• amenability to participation and appropriation, similarly without qualification criteria

Merton 1988, Cope & Kalantzis 2009

the perspective of History and Chemistry scholars and their digital support communities

http://www.sr.ithaka.org/

Long & Schonfeld 2013, Rutner & Schonfeld 2012

History Scholars Chemistry Scholarsgetting ‘intellectual control’ of the data sources

keeping up with all the relevant work being done in an area of specialisation

Publication at length Frequent publicationUse the ‘open web’ to find public and institutional archives

Use chemistry-specific digital resources

working as lone scholars, with support from archive librarians and other specialised research support professionals

Working in research groups, with support from technicians in laboratories or with computational tools or digital knowledge management tools

New research approaches: digital photography, GIS systems, data-mining text corpora

New research approaches: digital marking-up and archiving of raw data

History Scholars Chemistry Scholars

commitment to share the output of their work with public in an open, accessible way

a bias against open access journals because of focus on impact factors

interested in reaching a variety of audiences, including scholarly and public alike

not convinced that the public needs access to their articles - difficult or impossible for the general public to understand it

perceive barriers to publishing their most academically important work openly

perceive barriers to publishing their most academically important work openly

trend towards more open practices in intra-disciplinary communication but not in communication with non- scholarly communities

Budapest Open Access Initiative 2002, Finch Report 2012, Open Archives Initiative,Esposito 2013

‘public engagement’

http://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/

Holliman 2011

…in simple language

https://sites.google.com/site/junkthejargon/

Lievrouw & Carley 1990, Lievrouw 2010

…expanding channels of communication amongst specialist scholars and their professional support communities – an already identified and engaged constituency – rather than a deliberate opening up of participation in scholarly communication to non-specialists or the non-scholarly public

http://www.wikipedia.org/ http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/science/

Benkler 2006, Jenkins et al 2005, Weller 2011, Jensen 2007

History Scholars Chemistry Scholars

Blogging as a significant form for scholarly communication

No blogging observed

a supplement and enhancement to scholarship

tensions in the triangleBlurring the distinction between ‘knowledge discovery’ and ‘knowledge transmission’ – conflating the roles of researcher and teacher (Garnett and Ecclesfield 2011:13)

“As more of the world’s intellectual content is created in digital form, the risks of loss increase proportionately.” (Borgman 2007: 251)

a critical perspective

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415537971/

Values, digital texts and open practices - a changing scholarly landscape in higher educationColleen McKenna and Jane Hughes

Researching academic literacy practices around Twitter: Performative methods and their onto-ethical implicationsJude Fransman

The Literacies of ‘Digital Scholarship’ – Truth and Use valuesRobin Goodfellow

Goodfellow, R. & lea, M.R. (2013) Literacy in the Digital University: critical perspectives on learning, scholarship and technology. London: Routledge.

Digitality in practice can make scholarship more specialised and harder for outsiders to access. Openness to participation can make it less scholarly. Nevertheless, it is in the interest of scholars to be concerned with both. To bring scholarship, teaching and public engagement closer together must be the aim, but first we need to understand the ways in which practice makes them different.

Robin Goodfellow (2013) Scholarly, Digital, Open: an impossible triangle? Research in Learning Technology, Vol.23

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