I was very excited today to watch a video posted at Teachers College Record where Anthony Brown (a colleague in Curriculum & Instruction) discusses his research on how African American males have been constructed in the social science and educational literature. What a great way to summarize and present one’s work! I am embedding the video below, but keep on reading for more social/digital research goodness.

I’ve mentioned before that I think that educational research needs to be more social that it currently is. Why? Because I think that we can improve education by talking more to each other (and debating more with each other). TCR provided another example of this: Miseducating teachers about the poor is a critique of Ruby Payne’s framework written by Randy Bomer et al. (Randy is another colleague at UT). One can go through the TCR archives to see comments on the article, responses, and so on. Plus, there’s a couple of videos on the topic, which I am also embedding below.

Another critique:

And a response:

The point is that new technologies and cultural trends are exerting pressure on scholarship to change. The field has a lot to gain from scholarship becoming more conversational, transparent, social, and open. But, there are also pitfalls and complexities (e.g., TCR has the resources to create the professional videos included above while other publishing outlets might depend on individual scholars to contribute videos, which means that scholars’ technical abilities might limit their digital scholarship contributions). How’s that for a Saturday morning update? <smile>

P.S. Open access and TCR aren’t the best of friends however, so if you are not at a subscribing institution you may be out of luck there (though some of this content is publicly available for a while).