Hello,

I’m hoping that we are on the way to being fully back and operational. I would like to thank everyone for their patience and I will update you on progress as soon as I can

Sarah

The post We’re back (I hope) appeared first on Networked Researcher.

Hello everyone. This is a temporary public notice to let you know that the site has been systematically attacked by spammers (might have been as part of the recent robot spam injection attack on WordPress). One of the consequences was that as administrators we were unable to log in the site and were unable to update anti-spam and commenting plug-ins as well as to do any changes to the contributors’ permissions.

We have so many registered contributors that we were easy target. It took a while but I have finally managed to log in for the time being and have cleaned up the site from spam comments (it might not last long).

As a security measure I have changed the role of all contributors to subscribers; if you would like to post please contact me via email/Twitter (@ernestopriego) and I will see what I can do.

I have also deactivated a series of plug-ins including the Twitter mentions one that displayed Twitter mentions as comments.

As you may remember the intention of this blog was to encourage interdisciplinary, collaborative multi-author blogging around social media, blogging and educational technologies. It seems that in that sense we have failed as contributors stopped coming here to publish when not being actively prompted to do so.

This is an unfunded project so I cannot dedicate the required time to keep encouraging people personally to blog. This is also a reminder that if you want to contribute, this platform is open to everyone. Evidence shows that multi-author blogs get more attention than individual, personal blogs. Hopefully we will solve the spamming issue as soon as possible and we can post a new reminder of our ongoing call for posts.

In the meanwhile this post will remain here to indicate we are still working on the issue.

If you have received email notifications about your posts receiving spam comments, please accept our apologies.

I really hope we can keep Networked Researcher afloat and once the attack has been cleared we can restart blogging together.

The post Temporary Measures to Keep Networked Researcher Afloat appeared first on Networked Researcher.

This peer interview is with Trent M. Kays. You can follow him on Twitter @trentmkays. All links open in new windows. If you read this interview and find it interesting or useful, please take a moment to share it on your networks. Thank you.

Trent M. Kays

Ernesto Priego: Can you describe who you are and what you do?

Trent M. Kays: I’m a writer, teacher, agitator, and PhD student (soon-to-be candidate) in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota, where I teach and study things related to digital rhetoric, critical pedagogy, social movements, and the Internet. My writing appears in both scholarly and popular publications.

I do a lot of other things too. I’m a historical collector, once upon a time poet, bourbon drinker, judoka, and world traveler. I wasn’t always these things, of course.

I was born in a small town just north of Santa Barbara, California (USA). I grew up next to a military base, and my upbringing certainly has affected how I view the world. In one way or another, most members of my immediate family have been involved with aerospace technologies and professions. My father is an influential member of his field and works with all sorts of cool missile things, though he wasn’t always directly in this field. He was originally trained as an electrician, and he’s still a master electrician today. My mother has worked as some form of technical writer or publishing official on a military base for most of her career, one of my grandfathers worked for NASA and the other was in the US Air Force and then worked for an aerospace company.

I grew up around people who often think like engineers, so this has given me an appreciation for brevity and the power of writing. It’s one of the reasons I always wanted to be a writer. Writing creates, writing destroys, and writing allows one to belong. My family’s early working-class background instilled in me an omnipresent feeling of privilege. I understand how lucky I am, and I understand how hard my family and I have worked to get to our current life circumstances. Despite my doctoral studies and being separated from my family by about 2000 miles, I understand and appreciate their impact on my life.

My studies allow me to travel and think about the world in amazing ways. Currently, my research is looking into the discourse practices of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and even though my family isn’t always interested in some political aspects of my research, they are still always interested because I’m doing something. This is important to me because I’m the first member of my family to go to college, complete college, go to graduate school, complete graduate school, and then go to doctoral school. There’s a lot of pressure being the first in my family to go to college, graduate school, and doctoral school. I don’t mind it, but I often feel like I have to be successful because I’m responsible for a new chapter in my family’s autobiography.

EP: Tell us how you decided to enroll in your current program and department. What brought you there? Please do tell us as well what is ‘digital rhetoric’ and why it matters…

TMK: I never thought I would be a teacher. My original career path was leading me to government work, but during my undergraduate studies, I took a course in persuasive writing and got hooked. I had always considered myself a good writer; my mother always told me I wrote well as a child. After I completed my BA degrees–one in Professional & Technical Writing and the other in History–I decided to get my MA in the former. It was during my MA years that I really got a taste for teaching. The feeling was amazing. I was able to help struggling students become better writers, to help them become impassioned with their own studies, and work with them as equals. It was then that I knew I wanted to work with college students–or any students, really–and help them achieve their life goals. So, I decided to go to doctoral school.

The will to teach wasn’t the only reason I went to doctoral school, of course. Another driving force behind my decision was that I wanted to understand how people used discourse to do things in their lives and in the greater public community. Therefore, I picked doctoral programs that would allow me to experiment with teaching while pursuing my interests in public discourse and sociality. I applied to nine programs across the United States and got into most of them. The first program to call me back was the one in Minnesota. I talked to the faculty and grad students there, visited the department, and I loved it. The people, culture, and program were a perfect fit for me.

Digital rhetoric? Well, that’s a tough one. The definition is sometimes fraught with dissension amongst the peers in my field. I consider digital rhetoric to be the discourse practices (broadly defined) implemented in online and digital spaces. This includes visual communication, traditional text, online networked discourse, and methodologies for critical analysis of new media arising out of the digital age. These are quite broad and definitions abound. Some of my peers consider coding and other coding-related activities to be digital rhetoric; however, I don’t consider that digital rhetoric. I consider those types of activities to be in the realm of software studies and critical code studies.

Digital rhetoric matters because it is the driving basis for rhetorical theory in the 21st century. It allows us to understand, analyze, and critique the evolution of discourse in online and digital spaces. It helps us think about how the Internet has changed discourse conventions among offline, online, and hybrid communities, identities, and narratives. This works its way into teaching, learning, and other aspects of educational practice. This differs in many ways from classical and modern rhetorical theory in that digital rhetoric isn’t solely concerned with traditional print text and speech. Digital rhetoric forces us to think differently about how we communicate and contribute to contemporary and future knowledge systems.

I am, of course, boiling this down. I could talk for hours about rhetoric and 21st century discourse practices.

EP: I have no doubt of that! When we have thorough knowledge of something we often take for granted its importance- until we meet someone who does not have that knowledge… which brings me to Twitter, where I ‘met’ you. Please tell us why you use it– what’s there for you, how do you use it…

TMK: Great questions. I joined Twitter when it originally became available in 2006; however, I didn’t find it at all useful or interesting, so I deleted my account and moved on. But, after some time, I realized the value and rejoined in 2009. I’ve been on it every since, and my use of Twitter has only increased the longer I’ve been on it. I love Twitter. It’s connected me with a diverse group of both scholars and non-scholars, people doing really interesting things, and global conversations that I might have otherwise missed. I use Twitter because it’s a wonderful space for collaboration and discussion, friendships are made and lost there, and–in this way–Twitter is an excellent representation of augmented interactions.

I have another motive for being on Twitter: It’s a great place for research. Some of my main research interests are enacted in the discourse communities present on Twitter. As I mentioned earlier, my current research is focused on the discourse practices of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and I’m especially interested in how they leveraged social media (in particular, Twitter) and online discourse to affect offline action. The movement used social media in a particular way never seen before, and it’s exciting to see the evolution of the discourse they used on Twitter to really bring action to the streets.

So, I have a heavy investment in Twitter. I’ve been able to collaborate with peers all over the world, make new friends and colleagues, and participate in dynamic discussions and debates (e.g. #fycchat, #digped, #edchat, etc). It’s a wonderful tool. It seems I’m almost always on Twitter, and it’s become more part of my identity than I initially thought it would. I’ve received job offers via Twitter, and my various writings have been amplified through the network I’ve developed there. It’s a must have space for any public intellectual (or aspiring one!).

I know some don’t see the value or have trouble “getting it.” To them I would say: be patient and give it a chance. Social media is only as social as we make it. It can’t automatically be social for us. It’s about connection–for better or worse–and it’s about understanding the influence of networks on our everyday lives. I’ve heard people consider Twitter (and most social media) to be mundane, overly pedestrian, and silly. Those are all valid points. But, we shouldn’t use Twitter for just those types of activities, or we shouldn’t assume that all interactions will be mundane, etc. We should assume that every interaction is a valuable one. We should assume that those we encounter are worthy of our time, our graciousness, and our knowledge.

Too often, some online spaces can be poisonous. There was a great article a few years ago by John Suler titled, “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” Basically, when our communication is mediated by computers and we are unable to be physically present in front of our fellow discussants, we have trouble interpreting social cues and, consequently, can act like real jerks. This is old news in the computer-mediated communication world, but it’s still important to remember.

I only go into this detail because I don’t want people to get discouraged or feel intimidated by those who broadcast on Twitter. Those interactions are insignificant compared to the great good the tool can help others enact. Revolutions have begun and ended on Twitter, governments have been toppled by social media use, and disasters have been better managed because of social networking. These are important and historic things, and we shouldn’t forget them when our Twitter timeline fills with pictures of someone’s eggs benedict or adorable cat (both of which I am guilty).

EP: You seem to have a more optimistic view of the power of social media than I do!  I still see a huge disconnect between what happens on social media and what happens outside, “IRL”. Not that both worlds don’t co-exist, of course, or that social media is in any way “less real”. But there’s huge numbers not engaging in social media, and not only within Higher Education. Do we see social media through rose-tinted glasses sometimes you think? Or it might be that since these are still very early stages (relatively speaking) maybe there is not much room for critical nuance yet… Could you elaborate on this?

TMK: I have been accused of idealism, and I’m happy with that descriptor. In a lot of ways, I’m an idealist wrapped in a realist. I believe in the best parts of the Internet and the interactions we find there; however, I’m not so naive as to think that there isn’t a negative or less than positive aspect to our online participation. There are plenty of examples where the Internet has facilitated interaction that resulted in negative consequences. There are prominent instances of cyberbullying and suicide, academic bullying and slander, and issues of social media-induced depression. Some of these things I grant more weight to than others.

Heck, I’ve been bullied and slandered by some academics on Twitter who take issue with my critiques. I usually just shrug them off. I’m proud to be a scholar-agitator. I hate the status quo, and I want to knock it down! Of course, not everyone agrees and, thus, friction arises with my more critical-sedentary peers. Despite these incidents, we often forget that without the human element, social media is nothing particularly significant. Humans place value in the tools used, and we can take that value away. I tolerate and welcome divisive and productive discussions because I know I’m communicating with another human being, and it is through our conversation that we come to define our discourse communities and social media use. That’s valuable.

Unfortunately, many still argue that social media is simply an extension of the offline self or a complete separate self from their “IRL” self. This just isn’t the case. They aren’t separate things. This sort of binary allows people to dismiss what happens in online spaces as something different, something not always connected with responsibility. So, sometimes, I do think we look at social media through rose-tinted glasses, and it is because of this rose tint that the false dichotomy of offline and online selves continues to be perpetuated.

We hear or see this all the time. You hear pundits on news shows casually say, “Oh, it’s just social media” or “Don’t worry. They’re just Twitter users.” These types of dismissals are harmful to not only the great potential of social media but also to all sociality. It’s at the crux of sociality and network that critical nuance can flourish. I don’t think critical nuance is dependent on time from birth to adulthood. We can bring a critical eye to social media; however, I think there are too many pundits, teachers, and researchers who simply don’t want to try. They see social media as a burden or a loneliness-inducing experience; but, one does not suddenly become lonely. It takes time to build and is present outside of social media spaces. (Can you tell I don’t buy Sherry Turkle’s latest argument?)

I’m not too worried about the slow crawl of some groups to contemporary social media; I just think many in those groups–higher education included–haven’t had a chance to really jump in and explore, or perhaps they’re afraid too. As networked educators and researchers, I believe it to be our job to offer a helping hand and show our colleagues, students, and friends that online social media spaces aren’t scary or intimidating.

Most of the uncritical nuance I see thrown at social media is usually by those not deeply invested in its use or research into its use (e.g. news anchors, pundits, politicians, etc). But, like I mentioned before, I’m not too worried. I think we need to be patient and keep moving forward. At the very least, online interplay and social media forces us to reconsider how we interact outside of those spaces and in face-to-face circumstances, and that alone is worthy of our attention.

EP: To conclude, can you please share with us your vision of the future of Higher Education at an international level, and how you think we could get there?

TMK: My vision? That’s a lofty request, or it feels lofty. Honestly, right now, I think higher education is heading into an uncertain future. It costs too much, there’s hardly any government funding anymore, there are people living in parts of the world who don’t have access, and it’s seemingly becoming the playground for the privileged and financially well-off. It’s a sad time to be in higher education because it seems the more we move into the 21st century the more we encounter antiquated thinking. The romantic idea of college still exists in the minds of some, and, unfortunately, the reality is far from romantic.

That being said, I think higher education around the world needs a serious reboot. We need to change, and we need to do so sooner rather than later. I am very Freirean in my perspectives: I firmly believe that education is a tool to help people liberate themselves from whatever oppresses them. But, the type of debt-slavery being reinforced in many areas of the world is frightening. It sets students up to fail. Couple that debt-slavery with no to low access and we have a very scary future.

This is why I sometimes get jumpy and agitate things: I don’t want this future to happen. My vision of higher education is one where learning is treated as a process, where there are no grades and only assessment, where there are no tests that pigeonhole people, where the idea that everyone must go to college is no longer sold to children, and where professors’ teaching and research responsibilities are equally weighted and valued.

My vision is one where universities serve the community out of which they arose, where students are always put first, and where government funding means significant financial investment. I want to see administrative bloat properly addressed, and I think it’s time tenure was abolished in many contexts. We really need to focus on class size and strategically using technology, and we need to work toward making higher education freely available to students.

I know some of these things seem overly idealistic, but I wouldn’t believe in them unless I thought we could achieve them. I believe in the very best of humanity, social media, and the Internet. I think we can get to these things by focusing on connecting with the public more, by engaging in hierarchy-smashing social media discussions, by being public intellectuals, and by becoming involved in the political processes that have financially divested higher education. These are all doable things. We can start doing them tomorrow, and they are not difficult.

We need to burn down the ivory towers and become truly egalitarian. We need to throw open the doors of knowledge, make all our work open access, and work to liberate the oppressed. That’s my vision for the future of higher education. It’s going to be a lot of hard work, sweat, and tears, but I believe it’s achievable.

EP: Thank you for talking to us, Trent.

The post Peer Interview: Trent M. Kays appeared first on Networked Researcher.

This peer interview is with Sarah-Louise Quinnell. You can follow her on Twitter @sarahthesheepu and @networkedres. All links open in new windows. If you read this interview and find it interesting or useful, please take a moment to share it on your networks. Thank you.

Sarah-Louise Quinnell

Ernesto Priego: Can you describe who you are and what you do?

Sarah Quinnell: I am many things to many different people! I am the founder of Networked Researcher (this blog), I am the Early Career Blogger for SAGE Social Science Space, I am a freelance researcher affiliated to UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and more formally I am the Learning Technology Manager for Maudsley Learning a Community Interest Company based at the Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill, South East London.

Maudsley Learning is tasked with producing anytime, anywhere learning in the area of mental health and well-being. I am in charge of developing and maintaining the digital learning space as well as working with clients to develop digital learning solutions in relation to public information and professional development on Mental health conditions and care.

I absolutely love my job, my research interests focus on how people use digital technology to access and navigate virtual space for learning and professional development. In this job I can embrace my geeky side and play with gadgets, do serious research and make a difference in people’s lives and potentially end the stigma around mental illness.

EP: Tell us about Networked Researcher, how it came to be, all the beefy details! In other words, why are we here?

SQ: Wow! Why are we here… that’s deep! Ultimately we are here because in 2007 I contracted Scarlet Fever and was unable to do normal, ethnographic field research and instead I built a web site and did my research online. From this I got interested in the way social media can be used for research and professional development.

Post-PhD I became involved in a number of online resources to support early career researchers and I was asked to write blogs on social media and give talks and presentations and thus it was natural that eventually I would build my own site. So I did and then it grew! Over the last 12 months it has grown massively, there are now two of us who work on it and many contributors have joined us. It is no longer just a web site talking about technology use, it’s a platform and a community for people to publish and share best practice in the area of digital research. It’s the basis of the Networked Researcher Training Consultancy.

I am very proud of how it has developed, I am very humbled at people wanting to participate and Ernesto for coming on board to develop it with me. I think, well I hope, we have both got a lot out of it, especially when we presented NR at the AHRC Digital Transformations Moot.

EP: It’s been a real pleasure. Tell us about how you got into blogging, the ups and downs…

 SQ: It comes out of what happened in 2007 with a little bit of help, well actually a lot of help and encouragement from Dr Charlotte Frost, founder of PhD2Published. It is fair to say that without Charlotte Networked Researcher probably wouldn’t exist (so thank you, Dr Frost).

I was used to writing blog style pieces as part of my PhD research, posting updates on how my work was developing but nothing seriously. As I was approaching my Viva Voce examination I asked on Twitter if anyone had any Viva advice and Charlotte, through PhD2Published, gave me some brilliant tips and introduced me to her blog. After a number of conversations I agreed to come on board as Managing Editor and that is really where I cut my teeth in the world of blogging and where my confidence grew to develop this site. Here I learnt not only how to write a good post but how to market myself and my writing and from there many invitations to guest blog came.

I have also written for the thesiswhisperer, the LSE Impact Blog and the Guardian Higher Education Network and since December 2011 I have been a featured blogger on Social Science Space.

There have been many highs, I’ve been invited to speak at a number of events based on people finding my blogs and being interested in what I had to say. I have never been shy of saying things that are controversial and that is always a calculated risk. I am more recognised for my online work than I am for my offline publications. I think I embody the alternative academic or rogue scholar concept.

With the highs however, come the lows. As I don’t shy away from the controversial I have received some quite nasty criticism over some of the things I’ve written and sometimes it can be quite hurtful, particularly when the trolling takes people away from the real subject of the blog. Sadly this is part of the blogging world but doesn’t happen that frequently and the positives certainly outweigh the negatives.

EP: Please tell us about the positives. Any particular anecdote stands out?

 SLQ: The fame and the glory… no… seriously being asked to present the project at the AHRC Moot and being asked to speak at different Universities and run training. One of the coolest things was being asked to be on the panel for the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference postgraduate forum to talk about social media use. It was absolutely amazing to sit alongside many eminent professors and talk about what I did and be respected for it. I had arrived academically.

Also your coming on board was a huge thing for me as we have been able to develop the concept but also the fact you thought it was good enough that you wanted to be a part of it was a real honour and I am so grateful.

EP: Thank you Sarah, it’s been my pleasure. There’s still resistance to the idea of academics “marketing” their “identity”… what can you tell us about this?

SLQ: Oh yes, there certainly is sadly. I think that blogging and promoting yourself and your brand as a researcher is an essential part of the job whether you work in Higher Education or outside like I do. People need to know who you are and as we are now in an age where the focus is, quite rightly, on engagement beyond the academy and impact this is the best way, in my mind, to do so.

I’m very proud of being a ‘rogue scholar’, I think it fits with my naturally subversive personality. Academic culture needs a rethink and to be shaken up a bit and this is a great way to do it. Any institution is a product of its individual resources and in research that is its academics so it makes perfect sense to me.

What also makes sense however, is the fear. To talk about technology you need to be able to manage change. I think it’s essential that we are all change management specialists and are gentle with our more senior colleagues in how we engage them with technology.

In the end it boils down to being able to say ‘Tweet the Sheep’ at the end of a conference and everyone knowing who I am and that is awesome.

EP: What would your advice be to those still not sure about linking blogging and social media to their public academic persona? In other words, we know that the online public sphere can be a minefield, so what would your tips to navigate it successfully be?

SLQ: That’s a very good question! I would say that you need to decide on how you are going to approach social media, have a strategy why are you doing it, what do you want to get out of it. Being there just because everyone else is is somewhat pointless.

When you know what you want to achieve look at what different applications can offer you and choose the best selection for you to achieve your goals. Do not try everything just because its funky or your online profile will be littered with dead accounts.

Are you going to be professional or personal or both? I am a social professional so I will talk about work and my life outside of work and my views on certain things because that’s all that makes me who I am. Plus I would be too confused by two separate approaches. However, this can get you into trouble as I have experienced if you say something your organisation does not like. Thus speak to your line manager to make sure they know what you are about!

Lastly enjoy it, network, embrace even the most random opportunity. My career has developed and transformed largely through engaging with technology. I’m not where I thought I would be but I am really enjoying where I have got to.

EP: What are some other academic blogs you would recommend for those looking for inspiration (and why)?

SLQ: The ones that inspire me are: PhD2Published, where it all started for me. How to negotiate your way through the minefield that is academic publishing is tough and this is a fabulous resource for doing so. Also:

• The thesiswhisperer is a go to resource for all those completing their doctorates. Friendly support from across the world.
• The Social Science Space is a great one for, well, social scientists really lets you engage with the discipline and your peers.
• The LSE Impact blog is important for the same reason good debate and community development across platforms.

Last but not least would be The Comics Grid because that’s where I found you! Plus it’s funky and informative and shows a different side to scholarship.

EP: Ha ha! That’s very kind of you, to include the Grid! Finally, what is your personal vision of the future of Higher Education? Not necessarily in a science fiction kind of way but in a ‘realistic’ fashion: considering the challenges the sector is facing, where would you like to see change going and how do you see that happening? (Not easy, I know…)

SLQ: Wow; OK, again, deep. My personal vision for Higher Education requires more money and more engagement and less fear and stigma. More money for taught postgraduates. I have 2 nearly 3 (will finish my third master’s degree this year) and the funding for Postgraduate Teaching Schemes is non-existent! It’s hard work doing that type of study in a year and many PGTs, especially in Health and Social Care are working professionals so more funding and support needs to be driven toward PGTs.

We also need more engagement beyond the academy. The days of the Ivory Tower are well and truly gone, thank goodness, so let’s get out there and change the world. The best way of doing that is engaging with people!

The final one relates to the above I suppose: let’s stop calling people with PhDs failures for moving out of the academic sector and engaging with people and working commercially. Nothing wrong with exploring other options. Don’t make people feel bad; there are only so many jobs in labs!

How will this happen? Well, that’s the $6 million dollar question! It requires a huge culture shift both at the legislative level and in HEI’s themselves. Will it happen? I think it needs to but I won’t hold my breath just now.

EP: Thank you for talking to us, Sarah.

The post Peer Interview: Sarah-Louise Quinnell appeared first on Networked Researcher.

This peer interview is with Martin Hawksey. You can follow him on Twitter @mhawksey. All links open in new windows. If you read this interview and find it interesting or useful, please take a moment to share it on your networks. Thank you.

Martin Hawksey

Ernesto Priego: Can you describe who you are and what you do?

Martin Hawksey: I’m an advisor at the Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (CETIS), a national advisory and innovation centre supporting the UK Higher and Post-16 Education sectors on educational technology and standards. My main role was providing technical support for the UK Open Educational Resources programme (UKOER) but following its conclusion this has broadened out to supporting Open Education in general.

As well as my UKOER work I also helped and continue to support with CETIS social media monitoring. This mainly focuses around developing custom dashboards within Google Spreadsheets which combine activity data from various sources like Twitter and other social network channels to give an overview of how our various channels are performing.

This work on aggregating activity data is now spilling over into Open Education with research around Connectivist Massive Open Online Courses (cMOOCs). My main focus has been applying social network analysis techniques to data extracted from Twitter around course hashtags. A recent example of this is summarised in this blog post for the Current and Future of Higher Education course (CFHE12).

A key tool I use as part of this is the Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet (TAGS) template which I developed for storing, visualising and analysing search results from Twitter. TAGS has evolved over the last couple of years, developed in my spare time over evenings and weekends, and has been the seed for other tools like TAGSExplorer which is an interactive ego-centric view of a Twitter archive.

EP: Please tell us more about your work at http://mashe.hawksey.info/…

MH: I treat my blog as an open lab book. Everything I make or do I try to record. Because I make and do things in my own time as well as my work the line between what is me and what is CETIS supported often gets blurred.

The blog you see today isn’t the one I set out to write 4 years ago. Back then I was employed by another JISC-funded service, the JISC Regional Support Centre Scotland North & East (RSC), and my main focus was disseminating Higher Education news and events.

Directly influenced by Tony Hirst at the Open University, who was the first person to comment on one of my posts, my focus evolved and started mirroring his recipe for exploring and recording educational hacks. These started as quick hits usually turning a random idea into reality and recording it in a couple of hours, but now have more sustained focus, ideas like combining conference/TV tweets with video recordings evolving over several posts.

This last example is one of the reasons I keep blogging and avidly subscribe to over 465 other blogs. By reading and publishing thoughts and ideas, and in my case even if half-baked or at times only reporting failures, adds to the collective intelligence and creates opportunities for collaboration.

EP: Can you tell us about how you use Twitter and how you integrate it into your blogging/research work?

MH: Twitter is very important to me on several levels. Twitter is all about connections and through Twitter I’m connected to a very dynamic network of people from academia and other sectors. Through these connections I can gain a realtime insight to the ideas that are interesting them as well as the opportunity to ask questions. Critically this works both ways, so at the same time people following me can see what I’m interested in and ask me questions. As Twitter is an important dissemination channel for my work this also means I get immediate engagement and feedback.

Monitoring for references to my work isn’t limited to tweets that mention my name. In the Twitter application I use (TweetDeck) I’ve setup a search column for tweets that include links to my blog posts or pages on cetis.ac.uk using the term “hawksey.info OR cetis.ac.uk” (without quotes). The big advantage of this is can ‘listen in’ to how other people are referencing and discussing my work.

Martin Hawksey’s TweetDeck (screen shot)

I also keep a record of all these tweets using the TAGS spreadsheet I’ve developed as part of my other research. So for the last year not only do I know 1,530 people have tweeted links to my work but I can tell you in what context (the tweet text) they used.

EP: I’ve found your TAGS spreadsheet a really useful and generous tool (thank you!). Can you tell us briefly about the rationale behind it and how you’ve found other people have used it?

MH: Originally I developed TAGS way back in 2010 as a way to capture daily/weekly stats from event hashtags. The entire project was borne out of curiosity, an opportunity to see if it was something I could do. At the time the solution wasn’t really necessary as free services such as what used to be TwapperKeeper.com allowed you to archive and export the same data and analysis in seperate services like Summarizr.

Later, in early 2011 when revisiting the idea, I tried justifying the project: With services like twapperkeeper.com and downloadable apps like ThinkUp why have a Google Spreadsheet version? Not entirely sure I’ve got a good answer to that one. The biggest advantage is maybe it’s a quick way to collect tweets, make publicly available and collaborate exploring the data.

Shortly after that post TwapperKeeper announced the Removal of Export and Download / API Capabilities and was later sold to Hootsuite. Around the same time I was getting more interested in analysing and visualising data around hashtag communities. Using the flexibility of Google Spreadsheets TAGS was the ideal platform to research ideas like sentiment analysis of conference tweets, translation of multilingual hashtag communities, extended conversation analysis and even as a data source for Twitter generate subtitles.

In terms of who else is using TAGS it’s been fascinating to track who’s been using it and how. I get a lot of students (usually at post-graduate level) who are looking to capture data as part of their research or courses. There has been an interesting series of posts from Sam Martin, PhD student and author on twitterabused.org, exploring ideas like Visualising Twitter Networks: John Terry Captaincy Controversy.

At course level I’m aware of instructors like Mark Sample who uses Twitter in the classroom using TAGS to archive the class conversation. There is almost a daily mention of TAGS/TAGSExplorer being used to archive an event feed and it’s great to see people like the Modern Language Association not only use TAGS but also extend it’s functionality.

In the library sector #uklibchat use TAGS to record their weekly chats. Recently I commented on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog on how TAGS could be used to record evidence as part of the REF. Outwith education citizen reporting projects like #CitizenRelay and #CitizenCurators have used TAGS to capture some of the activity around their projects. And the list goes on.

EP: Finally, can you tell us about what you consider your core ‘technical’ skills to be, and how did you acquire them? What would you advise to scholars interested in developing their coding or data research skills?

MH: I wouldn’t say my technical skills are that strong but I benefit for having a broad range. So I’m by no means a programmer but I know enough code to get by, I’m not a statistician but I’m good at handling data in spreadsheets and so on.

The skills I’ve picked up mainly come from finding similar examples, trying to understand how they work and tweaking bits for my own purposes. Finding these examples involves following similar-minded people (in my case Tony Hirst is a big influence), being part of communities and having decent search skills. You can get by on very little technical skills if you are curious, creative and connected.

EP: Thanks a lot, Martin!

The post Peer Interview: Martin Hawksey appeared first on Networked Researcher.

This peer interview is with Liana Silva. You can follow her on Twitter @literarychica. All links open in new windows. If you read this interview and find it interesting or useful, please take a moment to share it on your networks. Thank you.

Liana Silva

Ernesto Priego: Can you describe who you are and what you do?

Liana Silva: I am a Graduate Writing Specialist for the KU Writing Center. I provide writing support for graduate student writers and for faculty and staff who work with those writers. I do writing consultations but I also do some writing coaching, in addition to always thinking about programming that grad student writers would be interested in.

I am also the Managing Editor for the sound studies academic blog Sounding Out!, a regular blogger for Inside Higher Ed’s University of Venus, and an avid Twitterer (is that even a word?) and blogger. In general, I think, I read, I listen, I write. Sometimes I cook. Sometimes I make jewelry.

EP: How do you include blogging in your academic workflow?

LS: Expressing myself in writing has always been easier for me than other forms of expression; it’s how I understand myself and the world, frankly. As a kid I had journals, I wrote poetry, I concocted stories, so I am drawn to tweeting and blogging. I became a regular blogger when I quit adjuncting and was immersed in dissertation work. I was at a place where dissertation writing was frustrating and producing a lot of stress and anxiety; I started blogging at Words Are My Game because I wanted to restore my faith in my writing abilities, and I thought creative writing would be a good way to do it. I figured, “I’m good at writing, what is wrong with me? Why can’t I write a decent dissertation chapter?” Blogging helped me remember I could still write and, more importantly, I could still enjoy writing.

The other thing you might not know about my becoming a regular blogger was that at the time I was unemployed and applying for different jobs across the board, some of which were writing-specific. I didn’t have anything other than academic writing samples, which frustrated me. I felt like I was ruined for anything other than academia! So I started blogging to also showcase my writing abilities in a different context. Over time, I’ve developed a more nuanced understanding of what academic writing is and what it can be, so I’m a lot more comfortable associating my blogging with my academic persona.

Now that I am done with the dissertation and working full-time, I still blog at Words Are My Game but not as often. I try to fit time for blogging/writing in the morning, waaaaay early in the morning. Because I work an 8-to-5 job, and because I sometimes commute to work (depending on the day of the week), writing at night is not always an option. So now I wake up early and write. I see writing and blogging as part of my scholarly/professional identity, so I try to commit to it regularly.

I also think of writing, and by extension blogging, as a way to think through ideas, questions, issues that I come across in my jobs or in my research, so the daily writing I do sometimes is just freewriting about something I read–freewriting that sometimes becomes a blog post. This also means that I end up oftentimes writing about academic topics more than other topics because I am usually reading those kinds of topics either for work or for research. It also means that a lot of my writing and ideas end up on the web instead of traditional (i.e., print) venues for academic writers.

EP:  Do you feel your peers acknowledge or recognise the contribution you make to academia with your blogging? Do you think the perception of academic blogging has changed recently to a more positive one or not?

LS: The reception to my blogging from my peers has been for the most part positive, and I think Twitter has a lot to do with that. I found on Twitter an audience that was interested in what I had to say, and I was in touch with that audience way before I started blogging regularly. It’s funny though: my tweeps know of my blogging way before, say, my boss or people from my job know. (I blog under my name, and my Twitter profile has my name, so I am aware that a quick Google search will lead you to my blogging.)

I also tend to engage in academic conversations more often on Twitter than on Facebook, so on Facebook my personal posts will get more comments than my academic posts. Regardless of where I post, I’m getting a lot more “I read your blog post!” or “I read your blog regularly!” now than I’ve ever gotten. I’m still not used to that.

I wonder sometimes if blogging has made me more visible to other academics or whether it’s because blogging in general is getting more visibility. It could be that my work has a bigger audience now, considering Sounding Out! is going strong for over three years now and I’m blogging regularly at Words Are My Game and University of Venus. However, there has been a move in certain areas of academia toward recognizing blogging as an academic enterprise (just take a look at MLA’s Committee on Information Technology’s Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media for an idea of how the tide is shifting), added to my increasing presence in social media networks, particularly Twitter.

The perception has changed, but it’s changing slowly. There are still a lot of academics who don’t acknowledge blogging as a legitimate academic exercise on par with other more traditional exercises. I’m not saying that blogging is better than traditional, peer reviewed academic articles, but blogging is a force to be reckoned with. For example, on Sounding Out! we are publishing every week smart, sharp, insightful scholarship by writers across the field of Sound Studies at a faster pace than any academic journal out there. Now how could someone ignore that? Simple: by ignoring it.

EP: In my experience engaging actively in social media for scholarly purposes poses challenges and opportunities for those who might feel disempowered or whose demographic or profession tends to be less well represented than others within mainstream academia. Do you agree? If so, could you elaborate?

LS: I agree that it poses a unique opportunity for those who are less well represented within mainstream media. It gives us a chance to articulate our views and respond to what others say about us. So many others seem to believe they understand our experience or that they represent us, and social media is a medium we can harness for our own benefit. It also acts as a springboard to a national, mainstream media platform.

However, the challenge to that is that everyone on social media has an opinion, whether it’s founded or not, and so those underrepresented minorities can be the target of commenters who may not understand what we’re talking about but who can still share their viewpoint with us, directly. Whereas before someone would just say something nasty about your column when they were reading at home, on social media it happens instantly and you’re expected to respond instantly too.

We as underrepresented minorities need to learn to deal with that backlash as well–and I don’t have a solution to that, but I know I’ve read comments about my work or my ideas that have stung and I had to take a step back and regroup. Lately I’ve become more visible in social media, so I’m still learning how to cope with that type of strong, negative response. But I don’t regret becoming more involved and more visible in social media. I’m a writer and I want my writing out there. Social media has been my way in.

EP: Openness, visibility and transparency have their risks, and these are often emphasised (I constantly read a lot of scaremongering telling students of job-seekers not to blog, while failing at offering useful tips on how to use blogging and social media to fit your individual needs). It seems to me we’re still learning what “the rules of engagement” in different social media platforms are (and these are likely to keep changing) but at this moment in time, what would be your main tips for positive, professional scholarly engagement with social media?

LS: I think the scaremongering comes from folks who are not blogging themselves, or who may have heard an awful story about how a blog or a tweet or a Facebook post was used against a job candidate. I wish more academics were using social media so that some of the fear were dispelled.

Ok, onto my tips:

• My first tip is, treat the people you interact with on social media like you would people in real life. I think oftentimes the fact that a person can respond anonymously to another or the fact that they don’t see the person they’re responding to emboldens some to be rude or downright mean. When I get riled up by a post or a tweet, I try to check myself: would I say this face to face? No? Then I better back down. They’re people too; that’s my rule of thumb.
• My second tip is, be social, be nice. A big part of the success of social media comes from the social part. It’s not about followers but about how many people you actually engage with. If you read a post you like, let that person know. If the tweet or post made you think, let them know too. Jump into conversations; it’s okay! When you can, respond. When someone shares your posts, thank them. It goes a long way.
• My third tip is two-fold, and tricky. Be mindful of what you say, but also be brave. The beauty of social media is that it allows people who have common experiences but aren’t in close proximity to interact. But even though social media seems transient, it posts can be found. So if what you’re posting is something that you don’t think you’d be comfortable with an employer seeing (which is what scaremongering usually comes down to), then think about why do you want to post it.
• My fourth (and last!) tip is, give social media a shot. If you’re curious, try a new site and give it some time. If after a while it doesn’t fit, let it go. Not everyone has to like Twitter, for example. Not everyone has to blog or use Facebook. I am much more nerdy in my Twitter account than on Facebook, for example. But I’ve been on both for a while (even took a Facebook hiatus for almost a year) and I have figured out how and why I use both.

I think my tips all boil down to being thoughtful of how you use social media. I am aware that I use Twitter to connect with others in academia, but I don’t intend to use Twitter just for networking, for example. So there are posts about a cool new playground or about bacon or about reality tv. I’m okay with that, and my followers sooner or later see what my feed is all about. I made a conscious decision to be open about my job but also about my extra-academic interests. But not everyone needs to do that.

EP: You have recently been appointed Associate Editor of the University of Venus. Can you describe what your responsibilities will be, as well as your plans for the future of the network?

LS: I’m happy to describe it! University of Venus, for those who are unfamiliar with the blog, is a collaborative blog hosted at Inside Higher Ed that wishes to bring forth the experiences of women in higher education and focusing on issues in higher education and how they affect women. (You can read more about U Venus here.)

As Associate Editor I hope to recruit more regular bloggers to add more diversity to the voices we already host on the blog. I also want to increase its visibility in the blogosphere and help build our community of bloggers and readers; U Venus is a project I care deeply about (I’ve been blogging with them since mid-2011) and I want others to see how awesome it is.

Lastly, I want to help our bloggers grow as writers, offering comments and support–something that’s more of a personal goal; I enjoy working with writers, especially on the level of ideas, and I have a lot of experience with academic writers. I’m a big writing nerd, hehe.

EP: Thank you for talking to us, Liana!

The post Peer Interview: Liana Silva appeared first on Networked Researcher.

This peer interview is with Mark Carrigan. You can follow him on Twitter @mark_carrigan. All links open in new windows. If you read this interview and find it interesting or useful, please take a moment to share it on your networks. Thank you.

Mark Carrigan

Ernesto Priego: Thanks for accepting this interview, Mark. Can you describe who you are and what you do?

Mark Carrigan: On my Twitter profile I describe myself as a ‘sociologist and academic technologist’. It’s not perfect but it’s the best I’ve managed thus far. In my day job I’m the managing editor of the LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog. I also train researchers to use NVivo (qualitative data analysis software) and, in the broadest sense of the phrase, online communication.

I’m in the final year of a part-time PhD in sociology at the University of Warwick, which has involved a longitudinal qualitative study of the internal conversations of undergraduate students. My aim with this has been to develop a new approach to conducting biographical research but it’s probably sensible that I wait until I’ve finished writing up before trying to decide if I’ve succeeded in this or not.

I also work on the sociology of sexuality, particularly asexuality and sexual culture, which is where my enthusiasm for public engagement first emerged. I used to run a website which aimed to connect asexuality researchers to the asexual community but I’ve put it in hold, at least until I finally get my thesis submitted.

I also run the Sociological Imagination along with my friend Milena (@IdleEthnographer), which is something I tend to forget when asked this sort of question because it’s something which is, in an entirely non-disparaging way, much more a hobby than it is ‘work’. I’m currently quite taken with the idea of Digital Sociology, partly because it’s helping bridge what has at times been a slightly frustrating experiential gap between stuff I do with my sociological hat on and stuff I do with my technological hat on.

Though having said that, I think I approach everything I do from a fundamentally sociological point of view though, albeit one concerned primarily with inner life and its social dimensions. There’s a sense in which I think this has always been true, although unfortunately I had no real idea what Sociology was until I was in my 20s, which led to me spending my first four years at university getting quietly pissy with philosophers for being the way that they are.

EP: What brought you to blogging and how do you insert it in your academic workflow? Please also tell us about your site, http://markcarrigan.net/.

MC: I’ve been blogging in various guises for over a decade now. To be honest I can’t remember the decision that led to my first blog – at this point it’s just something I’ve always done. There’s a lot of things I find interesting and, left to my own devices, I can often find it pretty difficult to focus. Blogging has always helped with this, as something which inculcates a degree of self-discipline about actually sitting with ideas and developing them, rather than just cognitively skimming the surface.

In the last four or five years I’ve also developed a slightly obsessive belief in recording every idea I have (lots of them are crap but it’s worth it for the 10% that are still good when you come back to them later) and my current blog fits into this but has also helped me connect it up with the process of actually putting the ideas into practice. I’ve written about this as ‘continuous publishing’ and it’s something I’ve become progressively more convinced by, though I appreciate it may not be for everyone.

It’s also pretty useful on a practical level, particularly when promoting events etc. Once you connect a blog to a well established Twitter feed, it becomes an incredibly potent publishing platform, particularly if the Twitter feed is well networked for retweets. I’ve tried consciously to use my website as an organizing point for my professional life (collecting everything I’m doing, in some way or another, as well as organizing commitments into themes and categories) but in the last year or so I’ve been pretty bad at keeping it updated. My eventual plan is to move all the updating stuff into Bundlr and then embed these into the site, so that hopefully curating stuff I do and keeping the site updated will become habitual.

But predictably I haven’t got round to it yet. It’s far from an urgent need but it does bug me if things I’ve made aren’t sufficiently organized. For instance there’s close to a hundred podcasts (of various sorts) I’ve made floating around the Internet and I’d really like them to be indexed and easily accessible from my site. However I’m aware that obsessively playing with Internet tools in the name of self-organization can become counter-productive. There are an enormous array of (free!) digital tools which, if approached in a reflexive and systematic way (I’m a huge fan of GTD) can hugely refine the academic workflow and offer enormous productivity gains. But on the other hand, there’s always the risk it can descend into absurdly circular and dangerously self-justificatory procrastination.

I guess a pretty large part of my use of social media amounts to little more than thinking out loud. Part of my enthusiasm for Twitter in particular, after maintaining for a long time that I simply couldn’t see the point of it, stems from the way it radically narrows the gap between thought and interlocution – it’s possible to near instantly throw ideas out there and get responses to them, sometimes leading to dialogues which can be illuminating to a degree which many would assume was impossible with such a radically constrained medium. But there’s an awful lot you can do with 140 characters and, perhaps, it’s often illuminating because of, rather than in spite of, these limitations.

One satisfying experience I’ve recurrently had with Twitter and I’m certain I’m not alone with this is the economy of expression it necessitates. Or, in other words, it’s really fucking difficult to express complex ideas within 140 characters and, as a consequence, it imposes a discipline on abstract conversation which is otherwise lacking. I find it an incredibly compelling antidote to some of the more deleterious effects which stem from the sea of redundant verbiage in which we can so often find ourselves swimming within the humanities and social sciences. Which is something I am by no means suggesting I am innocent of contributing to, something which will likely be starkly obvious to me when i read over these last few sentences… (it was). I like Twitter because I find this brevity intellectually productive, it dissipates the friction which unavoidably attaches itself to the process of articulating and rearticulating our ideas.

EP: What would your advice be to scholars who are new to either blogging or social media in academic contexts?

MC: Throw yourself into it. If there’s something in particular which piques your curiosity then don’t overthink it and simply pursue it. The best way to learn in this area is through experimentation, both in terms of the technical skills required (and if you can use a word processor then you can use these digital tools) and the more elusive self-understanding of what works for you as an individual. The idea that there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ way to use social media as an academic can be extremely suffocating – it’s best to reflect on what interests you about these tools and how they could fit into and extend your existing projects. Which is not to say that there aren’t risks about communicating online. There are. But in my view they’re chronically overstated. Display the common sense you would in other areas of your life and you’ll be fine.

EP: Finally, a double question: what kind of changes would you like to see in Higher Education or in academic culture in general, and do you think social media could play or is playing a role towards achieving those changes? And if not, why not?

MC: I guess more than anything else, I’d hope academic culture could become more open. Particularly in the sense of giving the same scholarly weight to the communication of knowledge as to its production. I think this persistent undervaluation can be seen across a whole range of issues, not least of all in the status attached to teaching. I’m not for a second saying the problem is entirely a cultural one, clearly the audit culture and the pressures individuals are subject to as they move through the career structure play a huge part. But I think it does have a distinctively cultural component to it, one which I hope might be partially overcome if we were to, say, see a mass migration of academics to Twitter. I’m not a technological determinist by any stretch of the imagination but I do believe communications technologies exercise conditioning influences over how we habitually orientate ourselves to others. Or, in other words, I think a widespread uptake of twitter within the academy would, in a variety of ways, tend to make the culture a more open one.

I think more academic activity needs to take place in public, albeit to varying degrees, so that those outside the academy can listen or participate. The humanities and social sciences are currently in a profoundly precarious situation and I fear such circumstances can actually serve to inhibit change rather than drive it. I recently interviewed the sociologist Les Back who argued that there is no future for a ‘timid’ or ‘conservative’ sociology. I think the same point applies more broadly. I don’t think a more open academic culture, in the broadest sense of the term ‘open’, is any sort of panacea but I do think it’s a necessary condition for moving forward under present circumstances.

The post Peer Interview: Mark Carrigan appeared first on Networked Researcher.

This peer interview is with Melonie Fullick. You can follow her on Twitter @qui_oui. All links open in new windows. If you read this interview and find it interesting or useful, please take a moment to share it on your networks. Thank you.

Melonie Fullick

Ernesto Priego: Can you describe who you are and what you do?

Melonie Fullick: Generally I’m a researcher and a writer, and I do some teaching and communications work (mostly in universities, though I’ve done some political communication as well). At the moment those things are happening in the context of me working on my Ph.D. in Education, so I’m also a full-time graduate student. My undergraduate degree was in Communication Studies (with a focus on mass media), after which I did an MA in Linguistics.

My area of research is post-secondary education (PSE) policy and governance, specifically the ways that changes are implemented in universities in “response” to larger socio-economic trends such as loss of government funding and the introduction of market mechanisms. I’m looking at Canadian universities, because I’ve been in Canada since the age of 14 (I was born and grew up in New Zealand). I attended high school and university here in Canada, so I’ve had the chance to observe the education systems first-hand and get a sense of which issues seem most relevant and pressing. Ultimately (eventually!) I’d like to go back to New Zealand and do some work looking at the education systems and their context there.

A couple of years ago I started my research blog, Speculative Diction, as a personal blog where I was commenting on issues relating to my field. Because higher education is in the news a lot, I found there was a lot to talk about. After about a year, I got an invitation to move the blog to the University Affairs web site. UA is a Canadian magazine targeted at audiences such as faculty and administrators, and they have a lively website with an expanding group of blogs. Since then I’ve also been doing fairly regular guest posts and articles for various other publications.

EP: How do you insert blogging in your academic workflow?

MF: I don’t know if I have a “workflow”–I might get more work done if I did. The way blogging fits in with all the other things I’m working on has changed since the blog moved to University Affairs. Before, I just wrote posts whenever the spirit moved me, as it were. So there are months where I did 2 posts, and other months where there were 10 posts. Now I do about three or four posts a month, it’s supposed to be one per week but I had some trouble making the posts shorter and more frequent.

Blogging ends up being fitted in around other things I’m working on. I try to set aside time, but I’m not good at working to deadlines; sometimes I just don’t have a good idea until the last minute (or, I get “blocked” somehow). And that might be a Friday morning, so sometimes the post gets pushed forward to Monday. So I think the biggest challenge has been trying to take my “usual” way of writing, which is not very efficient, and fit it in with this kind of schedule of posting regularly. I’ve taken on more writing commitments in the past year as well, so the challenge has only increased, but at the same time I’m learning how to write differently (in terms of the process) and it’s helping with my dissertation and academic work.

Reading this post by Pat Thomson, I realise I do have a definite set of practices that I engage in, which are designed to facilitate blogging. For example, I don’t tend to randomly surf the web; I use Google Reader to funnel relevant news to one “place” where I can scan it and comment on it (or tweet it). I have a good Twitter network and a lot of excellent news and articles come to me in that way as well. Each time I see something interesting, especially if it relates to a “theme” I’ve noted previously or something I’m following, I bookmark it with Diigo or tag it in Reader; if I have a blog idea immediately, I start a new Google Doc and come back to it later. If I see other articles also relevant to the post, I put them into the Google Doc as well (I tend to have a lot of little scraps of drafts sitting around). I think all those things make it a lot easier to keep good ideas going.

EP: Your work interrogates some deeply-rooted cultural and institutional types of behaviour that have allowed privilege to be one of the main modus operandi of Higher Education. Please tell us a bit about this; in your experience, are blogging and tweeting good strategies to promote transformations not being more widely discussed elsewhere?

MF: I think they are, but I also feel–often–as if I’m operating in two very different worlds. One where there is all this discussion about things that are very much at the edge of what’s possible in the current system; and one wherein there are very few changes and/or, if change happens, it’s viewed as a degradation. Now in the first case, there is this maelstrom of opinion and commentary and critique and I definitely don’t agree with all of it. But in the second case, there are familiar tracks of critique or none at all, and that isn’t necessarily going to help us either.

Somewhere in the middle of those two spaces (as if there are clear boundaries!) are the people trying to find their way in this system, “the university” and the institutional formations that frame it. It’s a system that’s clearly making some kinds of changes much more quickly than others. That’s part of my interest in graduate education; it’s a process of socialization, so how are grad students learning about the future of the university and their role in it?

A lot of the “messy” (and interesting) debate about this seems to be happening online, rather than in the hallways. Again, this is quite possibly just a very skewed perspective–I can’t speak from beyond my own viewpoint there. On Twitter and in blogs, people are discussing a broader range of issues than in the academic settings I’ve experienced. So in that way it feels like a different space, and I would like to be able to bridge the gap in some meaningful way, particularly given that it’s the everyday academic life where changes are unfolding in ways that are not necessarily visible because of their incremental nature, the limited period that students spend in each institution, and so on.

That’s why, in my research, I’m also speaking to tenured faculty who have spent long periods in a single institution. They’re keepers of institutional memory, or in some cases (as I’m discovering), memories the institution might prefer to forget. Most of them aren’t using social media, which is a shame because they have so much to contribute to the discussions going on there. This is one of the limitations we encounter with social media.

Not by coincidence, one of those “worlds” I described is primarily oriented to the current academic system, and one of them isn’t; the participants are different in each case as well, as are the relations between them. That’s part of what newly available technologies enable, and the university is having trouble dealing with those effects.

I know we hear an awful lot of punditry on the “disruptions” immanent, and though it’s tempting to dismiss the whole idea as rhetorical excess, I think that as usual, the extremes (and their proponents) are taking up a lot of room in the debate and making it harder for us to have a nuanced discussion about possibilities and limitations.

Too often faculty, for example, are reactionary because technology is brought to them as “yet another thing” that must be attended to, another box to check off, the latest fad that will keep the students (and governments, and administrators) happy. It’s also something they’ve never needed to get their work done in the past, so why should they start now? In other words it is a burden, a distraction. This has been pretty far from my experience with technology, and in researching how organizational communication works in the university, I’d say faculty need more space for a deeper and more inclusive discussion, and that discussion actually can’t happen only in online spaces.

EP: Those who haven’t been in scholarly social media for long or who have not joined yet might feel excluded from it all, and even base their opinions on a lack of direct experience with the platforms and their participants. How can we scholars who also use social media to interrogate structural privilege converse with them? Can we?

MF: I think your question is very kind–I’ve heard some extreme opinions from professors who have no idea what social media use looks like, but who were perfectly happy to pronounce it “useless”! But once again, they’re the extremes. Journeys are made from a thousand footsteps. With Twitter in particular, I’ve found it’s actually a challenge to convey its usefulness to anyone who’s never used it, including undergrads. What’s most interesting about it is that one hears the same complaints and dismissals from old and young alike: “I don’t care what you had for lunch”, “nothing of substance could be shared in that way”, and so on.

The emphasis on triviality and superficiality is no accident. Academic work is valued for rigour and depth, and I think most people associate those things at least to some extent with the amount of time spent on something, and of course–in academe–whether it has been vetted by peers. So often, texts produced outside these circuits of recognition are seen as less trustworthy. Short statements such as tweets are treated with suspicion because brevity, like rapidity, is seen as “leaving out” the complexity that we strive to work with as academics; and it forces us to rely on the credibility of the speaker rather than on the text. Worse, what if this new territory should begin to generate value of its own? What if these inferior texts should gain credibility and be recognised as part of academic discourse? I think this is part of the reaction we see from some academics; I think any kind of expansion of the sphere of (what’s perceived as) legitimate discussion is going to cause discomfort, and it’s going to be dismissed first, then contested.

So given that context, I think your question is very important because it gets at the heart of the issue: can we have this debate, if it’s happening in two different communicative “worlds”? Right now, the flow of debate is (I think) from traditional academic spaces to online ones; we bring to Twitter and blogs our commentary about what’s happening around us in higher education institutions, but I don’t think this goes much in the other direction at this stage (even Brian Leiter can only diss Twitter online because he has a blog). It’s still the case that academics can avoid having to “deal with” social media, because it hasn’t been a necessary part of the traditional scholarly career. This is how the avoidance of the discussion is directly linked to the ways that capital is attached to some forms and not others: some kinds of professional engagement are clearly and directly linked to advancement, and right now, this one is not. So there is not much professional incentive to join in.

I think this could change, which is something I was hinting at towards the end of my blog post about the debate on academic tweeting. Already, social media use has shifted from being an eccentricity, to being considered at least a “frill” that can set one apart from the crowd; and in a growing number of cases now, it’s seen as something integral to doing certain kinds of academic work, or disseminating that work to non-traditional publics. As this shifts over time, I think it will become easier to have the discussion that we want to have, both offline and online.

EP: Finally, what kind of changes would you like to see in Higher Education or in academic culture in general, and do you think social media could play or is playing a role (if so, which one?) towards achieving those changes?

MF: When I think about the university I would like to see, it’s basically very selfish thinking because I tend tend up asking, “what kind of university would I, personally, would want to work in?”. Bearing that in mind, what I would like to see would be the loosening of the strictures that currently define who gets to teach, who gets to research, who gets to be a part of the university in an ongoing way, and who gets compensated for their work in sustaining the institution and fulfilling its purpose. I’d like to see the necessary broadening of the idea of an “academic” that comes from this. And I think this is also going to mean changes to the way the university builds relationships beyond its walls.

There are more Ph.D. graduates, for example, who are having to leave the system or take up the least-compensated positions within it, because there is no room for them and because the “traditional” positions were so resource-dependent that few can be supported in the way they were in the past. This is an issue not only with the academic career but also with academic knowledge itself, which is intimately linked to the system of professionalization that produces tenured faculty. At the moment there is a hierarchy of prestige in this system that places tenured (research) professors at the top, and everyone else below, in service to, and/or in orbit around them. There is also a rigid structure of “production” that legitimises research work, a structure with which academic careers are tightly–but not inextricably–intertwined. This is accompanied by, for example, the belief that research produced outside this system cannot be credible or “objective” (since its authors didn’t have academic freedom, or were not subject to the right kind of peer review).

But within the current climate of (policy) discussion, it’s tricky to make suggestions about change and “openness” because others with louder voices have already made plenty of them, while espousing solutions I personally wouldn’t agree with. To me that looks like the biggest challenge: to have a debate where we have real choice about what options are on the table, not just “here are the three ideas we’ve decided are worth consideration”.

This is where the nature of our communication about these issues is of vital importance. Will it be monologic or dialogic? Will we have our “options” imposed on us by those with the most political and financial resources? Will we really be considering the university as a knowledge institution, as an historical institution, rather than as primarily an economic and technocratic one? I don’t know if social media can have a role in this, but I hope so; I think we can already see the beginnings of it in people’s activism around various issues like adjunct labour in the U.S., and open access to academic research. It’s going to require broad participation, but I don’t think such efforts are unheard of, and they are enabled by many of the same technologies described as “disruptive”.

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While it is often futile to attempt to predict the future of anything, that is what I am going to try to do here.  I will also include some elements of a future that I would like to see–not necessarily the future that I think will happen.

In the area of libraries, there has been a spate of blog posts and articles concerning the future of libraries (for example, see here, here, here, and here), including both academic libraries and public libraries.  In this blog post, I intend to write about the future of scholarly communication covering a span of 10-50 years.  Libraries and scholarly communication are close cousins and the activities of one often have a big impact on the other.  However, the areas of libraries and scholarly communication live in slightly different environments, and the people who work in those industries perform different roles and have different functions.

I am mostly going to concentrate on the journal publishing business side of scholarly communication.  The scholarly monograph industry is under great turmoil right now, and I don’t have as good of a grasp of that side of the business to begin with, so I will leave prognostication of the scholarly book and ebook industry to others.

You may ask yourself, why should we try to predict the future of scholarly communication?  In my case, I have an interest as an academic librarian.  I would like to know where the academic publishing industry is headed, and putting my thoughts down in this blog post helps me organize my priorities for action as a librarian.

Enough of the back story.

Scholars and researchers will continue to use articles as the means to communicate research results, but the structure of article communication will change.  For example, preprint and post-print servers have been used as primary communication mechanisms in some fields of physics and computer science for over 20 years.  This is the case even though the final peer-reviewed and layed-out published article is needed by researchers to attain tenure and promotion at their institution.  As altmetric indicators become standardized in various fields, more and more researchers will submit altmetric numbers to document additional use of their research beyond article citation counts and journal impact factors.

At some point, when administrators become more familiar with altmetric use indicators, the value of the journal as a container will go down, and the situation will flip.  It will be more important for the researchers to publish in open sources (just about any open access journal will do) or publish the research in a repository, in a blog, or any place that is on the web.  As long as the research is out there on the open web, anybody will be able to find it, read it, use it, cite it, and draw knowledge from the article.

These changes will lead to a decoupling of the scholarly journal, but the decoupling will not happen at the same time for all fields of research.  People in different subject areas will encourage greater experimentation with decoupling of various types and forms.  In computer science and engineering, for example, I could see research that used to be published in formal conference proceedings will be published as manuscripts or presentations on the web.  The peer-reviews could take place after the conference is done.  Committees or groups of people could set up systems to rate or rank the research that had been presented at conferences.

The life science research system may adapt to change in different ways, and they may take other approaches to decouple the journal.  For example, PeerJ is a new publishing system with a membership model of publishing.  This form of publication may become extremely popular.  Contraction of research into a small number of megajournals such as PLOS ONE may become more prevalent. PeerJ and PLOS ONE are not decoupling the journal and peer-review system, but they are good examples of experimentation.  With new publication systems, the title of the journal will not be as important as the availability of the research to a world-wide audience.

Much of the change is going to be mandated from the funding agencies.  If the NIH, the Wellcome Trust and other funding bodies require the research to be available as Open Access, then the researchers will work to meet the demands of the funders.  The prestige of big name subscription journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.) will go down because administrators will recommend that their researchers publish in less expensive open access journals, or simply post the research to an institutional repository.  As long as the article is available to the rest of the world, altmetric systems will be able to monitor the use and value of the work to other scholars and researchers.

The post Predicting the Future? Where is Scholarly Communication Headed appeared first on Networked Researcher.

This peer interview is with Adeline Koh. You can follow her on Twitter @adelinekoh. All links open in new windows. If you read this interview and find it interesting or useful, please take a moment to share it on your networks. Thank you.

Adeline Koh

Ernesto Priego: Please share with us who you are and what you do…

Adeline Koh: I am an assistant professor of postcolonial literature at Richard Stockton College, and this academic year I am a visiting faculty fellow at the Greater than Games lab at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute.

I was originally trained in 20/21st Century British and Anglophone literatures and postcolonial theory, but since then my research has broadened to include film, new media and the digital humanities.

At Duke this year, I’m designing Trading Races, a historical role-playing game set at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2003, the year of the landmark Supreme Court decisions. Players in the game assume the roles of an imaginary Michigan Student Assembly and real figures such as Sandra Day O’Connor, John Hope Franklin and Carl Cohen.

The game aims to teach race consciousness to undergraduate students. We just completed our first playtest, and the game is set to pilot in two classes (one at Duke and the other at Stockton College) in Spring 2013.

EP: Can you tell us about your http://www.adelinekoh.org/ site? What´s your vision for it, and how do you include it in your academic workflow?

AK: adelinekoh.org pretty much functions as a combination of an academic blog and updates about anything I’m doing that others might find useful. Sometimes I’ll put up ideas that I’m musing through to get feedback (my hack/yack post and archival silences and colonialism post part one and two are examples of these); otherwise, I’ll put up slides of talks I’ve given or storifies of events I’ve taken part in. I don’t have a regular schedule for it in my workflow, but I usually try and update it if I’ve done something interesting lately.

EP: How did you start blogging? What took you to it and what were the challenges you first faced (technical, cultural, etc.)?

AK: Like many academics, I was averse to blogging for many years as I thought blogs were mostly an outlet for adolescent angst, rather than serious work. But I began following some academic blogs around 2009, which showed to me that blogging could really be used as a serious academic tool to disseminate ideas, get feedback and to grow your own scholarly community. So I started blogging–in slow steps. Most of my blog posts began with reporting on events I’ve attended. I don’t think I’ve faced many challenges with blogging so far, other than the occasional troll-ish comment.

EP: What were the blogs that made you change your mind, and where do you think that idea that blogs “were mostly an outlet for adolescent angst” had come from?

AK: The usual Digital Humanities suspects :) Mark Sample’s blog, Brian Croxall’s blog and most of the ProfHacker team. Dan Cohen wrote an excellent blog post in 2006 titled “Professors Start Your Blogs” which writes against the stereotype about blogging being an outlet for display of teenage teenage angst, arguing that blogs are simply one genre that can be adapted to many purposes. Where the stereotype comes from? I guess reading one too many of such blogs in the early 2000s…

EP: I guess there’s a similar negative stereotype about tweeting being just about Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and what you had for lunch… can you tell us about how you personally use Twitter within academic settings? It was through Twitter that I first became aware of you and your work. Feel free to include advice for those still in doubt…

AK: Yes, the same translates to negative stereotypes about Twitter. Within academic settings I’ve found livetweeting events (with permission, where possible) a great way to both contribute to the academic community and to get to learn about other people’s work. I’ve learned so much about what goes on at conferences I’ve never heard of simply by listening in on people’s hashtags. It’s also been a terrific networking tool, when used appropriately. I’ve also had many interesting conversations with people over Twitter, mostly about the state of higher education. What I like most about the medium is that it allows anyone to join in. Its openness has been, for me, one of the most attractive things. And to those who are still in doubt, I’d point them to Ryan Cordell’s post on why you should have a digital academic presence–to summarize, it often creates an “entry point” for people to get to know you and your work, and vice versa.

EP: Final question: do you feel your online presence is recognised positively amongst your peers and wider academic circles? What do you think is needed to improve online scholarly behaviour –discussing themes, sharing links to articles and other references, participating in conference backchannels?

AK: In general, yes. My online presence has been critical to reaching audiences outside of my own institution–something extremely important to consider if you are based at a small liberal arts college like mine. It’s led to many invitations to give presentations, collaborate in different projects etc. But this may have something to do with the fact that most of the research I’ve been disseminating via my online presence has to do with topics on the digital humanities and digital pedagogy. People in my more “traditional” research fields–postcolonial theory and world literature–might consider my work in social media to be less significant.

In regard to your question about improving online scholarly behavior–I think that being a good “digital citizen” is similar to being a good academic citizen in general. Don’t self-promote exclusively; promote the work of others that you find interesting. Enter into discussions respectfully; treat others the way you would like to be treated yourself. And as far as possible, cite your references–or link to them.

EP: Thank you very much for giving us this interview, Adeline.

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