The paper posted below is for an ITFORUM discussion I am leading on the topic of participatory scholars and participatory scholarship. Feedback is much appreciated!
Participatory Scholars and Scholarship
Dr. George Veletsianos
Instructional Technology
Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education
The University of Texas at Austin
ITFORUM Discussion paper: April 12-16, 2010
This paper is in very draft form.
Feedback is welcome (and greatly appreciated)
Participatory Scholars and Scholarship
Preface
Rarely do we post in-progress scholarship for public consumption. We usually hoard our research until journals are ready to publish it, at which time it magically becomes a “finished product,” despite the value of sharing, discussing, critiquing, and presenting our thoughts. In line with the ideas presented in this paper, and to demonstrate that sharing in-progress scholarship can be beneficial both for the field and the authors sharing their work, this paper is intentionally shared at an early phase of conceptualization. Some of the arguments and ideas presented below therefore are in need of further development. I expect that by the end of our discussion, I will have gained great new insights from you. I also hope that you will have gained much from this process, both to inform your future scholarship and your online presence and activity. Let the learning begin, and feel free to critique anything and everything!
Introduction
Educational technology research and practice has traditionally focused on instructors, trainers, learners, and learning environments, seeking to delineate the impact and implications of technological interventions on various outcomes such as learning and engagement. In this paper, I focus on scholars (e.g., doctoral students, professors, and researchers) and those supporting their roles (e.g., learning technologists) and their participation in online spaces. I argue that participation in online spaces (e.g., communities and networks of practice) is becoming increasingly important and absence from these spaces can be detrimental to scholarship, practice, and personal and professional development. For instance, participatory scholarship enables scholars to stay current in their research field, explore new approaches to teaching from their colleagues, engage with individuals mentioning their research/work, and expose their work to larger audiences.
While scholarship may traditionally be viewed as scientific discovery, its meaning in this paper is broader. Pellino, Blackburn, and Boberg (1984) for instance have expanded scholarship to include (a) professional activity, (b) research/publication, (c) artistic endeavors, (d) engagement with novel ideas, (e) community service, and (f) pedagogy. Further, Boyer (1990) proposed four functions of scholarship that reflect academic endeavors: scholarship of discovery, scholarship of integration, scholarship of application, and scholarship of teaching. In this paper, scholarship takes this broader meaning.
Networked & Participatory Scholarship
The term “participatory culture” describes a society in which the consumer is no longer a passive recipient of information, media, and artifacts, but also a producer of these. Jenkins et. al. (2006, pp. 7) describe a participatory culture as one
- 1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
- 2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
- 3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
- 4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
- 5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).
The concept of participatory cultures has been embraced in educational circles, in which prior research has highlighted ideas similar to the ones proposed by Jenkins et. al. Notably, the description of participatory cultures proposed by Jenkins et. al. aligns with socio-constructivist (Kukla, 2000) and connectivistm (Siemens, 2006) points of view: In particular these two schools of thought imply that scholars practice scholarship within online social networks that serve to expand their learning, views, and activities relating to research and teaching practice. Situated within a community of practice, scholars’ work and activity becomes the mediating object which bounds together the network and community (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006). Specifically, Vygotsky (1978) highlights the importance of social interaction and negotiation of meaning in learning; Lave and Wenger (1991) discuss how learning transpires within communities of practice; Jonassen (2000) notes the value of active participation in learning; and McCombs and Whisler (1997) highlight the benefits of student-centered learning environments. In an era where social media participation is central in youth’s daily lives[1] (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, & Smith, 2007), researchers have sought to understand (a) the practices and activities of youth in Social Networking Sites (Ellison, Steinfield & Lampe, 2008; boyd, 2008) and (b) the meaning of social media participation for 21st century education (Greenhow, Robelia & Hughes, 2009). While youth participation in social networking sites has seen extensive research interest in recent years, research on networked participation and the activities of scholars in online spaces is minimal. Specifically, while scholars have explored the affordances of social media for instructional and professional development purposes (e.g., Martindale & Wiley, 2005; Webb, 2009) writing in relation to the implications of the participatory culture for social scholarship beyond conceptual explorations is scant.
Lack of research however, does not mean that there is no interest in the topic. While higher education faculty may be more inclined to use “traditional” technologies than students (Roblyer, McDaniel, Webb, Herman, & Witty, in press), we have seen an increase in specialized social media tools targeting scholars. For example, Academia.edu (figure 1), Researchgate.net, and VIVO are three instances of online networking tools for researchers; TechLens is a research paper recommender system and Sciencefeed is a science-focused microblogging platform. In addition, web-based bibliographic tools, such as Zotero and Mendeley enable scholars to share their bibliographies and collaborate with others (figure 2), while social bookmarking sites enable the sharing of resources between scholars as well as between instructors and learners (Greenhow, Robelia & Hughes, 2009). For example, various web-based resources that were collected for the writing of this paper are available at http://www.delicious.com/veletsianos/scholar.
Figure 1. A publicly available profile on Academia.edu (http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardPrice)
Figure 2. A publicly available bibliography on Zotero.org (http://www.zotero.org/groups/web_2.0_in_education)
Indeed, it seems that scholarship is increasingly moving online and becoming more social and conversational in nature (Oblinger, 2010). The rise of the participatory web and scholar-focused web-based services provide enhanced opportunities for interaction, collaboration, and networking and renewed promise of breaking away from departmental and institutional silos (c.f. Hanson, 2009; Nixon, 1996). Yet, recent evidence from the British Library and the Researchers of Tomorrow project (2010) indicates that young researchers (doctoral students born between 1982 and 1994) are not utilizing social networking technologies for scholarship. Given the increasing empirical evidence suggesting that Net Generation students do not use technology in fundamentally different (or sophisticated) ways (Reeves & Oh, 2008; Nasah, DaCosta, Kinsell, & Seok, in press), one would expect that scholars born prior to 1982 are also not capitalizing on networked technologies for scholarship.
Scholars need to understand the affordances of networked technologies for social, participatory, and networked scholarship. Prior to discussing the important issues relating to 21st century scholar participation in online spaces, the following section presents trends influencing contemporary scholarship.
Trends influencing Digital Scholarship
A convergence of technological and social trends is promising to exert strong pressures on 21st century scholars and scholarship. In particular,
- Open Access (OA) publishing: OA publishing refers to the online publication of materials (especially journals and books) that are free-of-charge, and thus accessible to everyone. For example, Athabasca University Press is an OA publisher and Educational Technology & Society is an OA peer-review journal. This is not to say that OA publishing will replace traditional journals. For example, doubts about sustainability remain, especially as popular online journals close their doors (e.g., Innovate)
- Publication impact: On the one hand, online publishing allows authors and other interested parties to easily track the reach and impact of a publication (e.g., download counts). On the other hand, online publishing allows us to rethink peer-reviewed publications. For instance, the Public Library Of Science has started publishing a variety of metrics for each of their publications including article usage statistics (e.g., pageviews), comments/notes/ratings left by article readers, and blog posts citing published articles. These data help researchers gain a firm understanding of the impact of their publications, along with providing transparency to the research community (e.g., figure 3 shows the most read education articles/authors on Mendeley.com).
Figure 3. Most read articles and authors in Education (screenshot from Mendeley.com)
- Open Education: Open Education refers to open access to teaching/learning materials and institutions, and Wiley and Hilton (2009) argue that higher education must embrace openness to remain relevant in society. Examples of open education vary, ranging from individual faculty sharing their syllabi, to institutions sharing learning materials en masse online, to instructors opening up their online classrooms to learners who are not formally enrolled in a course.
- Tenure & Promotion (T&P): Research, teaching, and service are obviously valued in academia, but tenure and review policies are under pressure to change. For instance,
- T&P committees are accepting additional evidence for engagement with these three items (e.g., professional blogs as engagement with new ideas and scholarship of discovery)
- Additional items are being included in the list of valued contributions to the academy (e.g., software development)
- Scholars are utilizing the affordances of the web to support their T&P applications (and being open about the process in the course of doing so), and are able to provide multimodal evidence to support their applications (e.g., video). One example, is Dr. Couros’ application for tenure.
21st Century Scholars & Participatory Scholarship: Issues and Complexities
Even though recent technological advances have provided the impetus for scholars to productively participate in online networks of practice, the issues that arise as a result of participation in networked spaces are complex. Technical skills (such as setting up a blog or an RSS aggregator) are the least of scholars’ challenges. Participation in networked spaces for scholarship also requires a paradigmatic shift with respect to our identity as scholars and the purposes of education and scholarship. Below, I highlight a few of the issues related to participatory scholars and scholarship
- Participatory scholarship requires scholars to develop Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). PLEs “are the tools, artefacts, processes, and physical connections that allow learners to control and manage their learning” (Couros, 2010) while PLNs are the “the sum of all social capital and connections that result in the development and facilitation of a personal learning environment” (ibid). PLEs/PLNs were originally popularized for the generic learner but their appropriateness might shine in participatory scholarship and researcher training where self-directedness, lifelong learning, and personalization in learning, teaching and research is at the center of our work. Importantly, PLEs and PLNs as concepts rather than technological tools. While the information, knowledge, and connections harnessed within a PLEs/PLNs may be the result of tools (e.g., software aggregating relevant information), it is the idea of the individual being in charge of flexible and meaningful digital spaces that contain dynamically updated and personally-relevant information that is important. Similarly, while the PLN may be build, traversed, and mediated by contemporary social networking tools (e.g., Twitter), what is important is the notion of being able to access and share a persistent, co-created, and mutually beneficial space with other scholars. An example of a PLE is presented in figure 4. This image was taken from my RSS reader and shows a collection of items that I have marked as deeming further attention. In this image you will find articles that are in press and have just been posted online by the journals in which they were published (e.g., figure 5) and Blog posts from colleagues and students. Subscribing to RSS feeds for journals relevant to one’s field can be a daunting task, but this is where the value of openness, sharing, and networked participation in online spaces for scholarship is demonstrated: Dr. Doug Holton has created an extensive listing of RSS feeds for more than a hundred journals and has made it publicly available at http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/journals/
Figure 4. An RSS aggegator … Read the rest
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