Tag: scholarship

Academia, networkedscholar, Open Education, OpenAccess

Being #Open Comes with a Number of Assumptions, Challenges and Tensions #scholar14

Laura Pasquini

Being an open educator is critical. From my personal experience, I have engaged and interacted with research, teaching, and service scholarship based on the examples I have seen around me.  A large number of collaborative research and learning opportunities could not have been possible without using open and social platforms. To be a truly effective educator and researcher, I believe it is critical to share our research-to-practice work. It is through transparency and openness, scholars are able to contribute to their discipline, connect to other related fields, and, most importantly, contribute to public knowledge.

open
Photo c/o Flickr member OpenSource.com 

As I think about digital scholarship and “openness” as an early career researcher, there are a number of questions unanswered and need to be discussed further as academia is challenged by the digital (Pasquini, Wakefield, & Roman, 2014, p. 13) :

  • What type of research exchange will scholars participate in during the 21st century?
  • Is scholarship just about publication and citation index?
  • Should research require a social aspect to connect and exchange discourse and/or debate?
  • What social media and altmetrics are best suited for interaction and engagement within each discipline?
  • How do individual research impact factors influence academia career development?
  • What suggestions do seasoned researchers have for the digital scholar generation?

Challenges and tensions should be considered when openly giving back to the resource pool of learning and research. A number of researchers have expressed their concern for being open and sharing methods, research findings, and other aspects of the “process” of learning and research. To balance these concerns, also comes the tensions of network influence, identity, and impact that continue to pour over from #scholar14 Week 1 conversations:

“Uncovering differences in network structure according to discipline and position points to a relationship with academic career trajectory and identity. This finding contradicts the perception that the online environment acts as a democratising space, suggesting instead a preservation of ‘off-line’ hierarchy” (Jordan, 2014).

Within this past week, I was fortunate to hear how a few members of my personal learning network grapple and manage these dueling tensions in academia – here are a few notes, tweets, and ideas gathered from these talks:

  1. Martin Weller‘s #UTAlink talk  Battle for the Open
  2. Royce Kimmons (@roycekimmons) Assumptions, Challenges & Tensions #scholar14 Chat
  3. Dave Cormier‘s #aln14 Keynote on Rhizomatic Learning – The Community is the Curriculum

“Tearing down the traditional walls” is becoming more common in online, social academic communities. This breaking down of the traditional norms in academia, is designed to remove barriers placed between the faculty member and their learners. To be part of this sharing community, you need to really embody core values of openness, equity, access, and sharing. The challenge often emerges when your own philosophy of being “open” is not inline with your post-secondary education institution. I strongly believe that open needs to be a key  attribute for PSE institutions to take the lead on, specifically in terms of policy or manifesto that includes (e.g. Open Access @ UNT), OER resources, open scholarship, open data resources (e.g. UNT Data Spot),  and more.

How does the culture of your academic community, discipline, or institution influence you? Are there considerations and tensions challenging you “to be or not be” in these open spaces? Please share. My ears and eyes are open. Always.

References:

Jordan, K. (2014). Academics and their online networks: Exploring the role of academic social networking sites. First Monday, 19 (11 – 3). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4937/4159 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i11.

Pasquini, L. A., Wakefield, J. S. , & Roman, T. (2014). Impact factor: Early career research & digital scholarship. TechTrends, 58(6), 12-13. DOI 10.1007/s11528-014-0797-7

networkedscholar

Presence & Visibility With Scholarship #scholar14

Laura Pasquini

Are you “present” online? Do you share your scholarship? Are you blogging about your research in the field? Can I find a slide deck of your last academic presentation on SlideShare? Have you tweeted about your academic writing lately (#acwri)?

Based on last week’s conversation in The Networked Scholars (#scholar14) MOOC – you probably should. Week 1 focused on Visibility, Presence & Branding – Check out the LIVE chat video and tweets. During the live chat discussion, Laura Czerniewicz reminded us that:

The challenge with online “presence” is that scholarship and research distribution is not shared equally – or at least not well represented online (based on the Web of Science documents):

This image and article left me with a number of questions for visibility and presence for scholars:

  • Why is the representation of scholarship skewed geographically?
  • What impact does this geographic distribution of knowledge have on our research disciplines?
  • How can we work to have more “market share” of knowledge in underrepresented areas of the globe?
  • Do the location of networking sharing services impact the voice of disciplines? Can this be neutralized/balanced?

Although the web has the potential to create a level playing field for scholarship participation, there still seems to be infrastructures and institutions in academia that prevent researchers from uploading content and sharing knowledge across geographic boundaries.

With the growth of digital scholarship and online knowledge sharing, it is critical that scholars engage in distribution of their research impact to their field. Through research identity management and citation tracking, scholars are able to specifically identify influence, share findings, access publications, and connect with academic peers for collaboration and further scholarly work:

Academics should utilize these emerging platforms to increase their influence and reach beyond traditional publishing forums. These researcher identification and citation tools are not “just for geeks,” but rather a growing expectation for scholarship development and publication notation. It is a critical time to rethink how research is produced, distributed, and acknowledged. Researcher impact tools, such as ORCID, Researcher ID, Scopus, and Google Scholar Citations, will help to identify citation influence and impact of knowledge for the field with respect to publication use. Social academic tools, such as Academia.edu and Mendeley, provide scholars a place to share their professional profile, links to research, and areas of research interest (Pasquini, Wakefield, Reed, & Allen, 2014).

It is important to consider where you will share your progress, publications, and work for your discipline. It also helps to organize your scholarly citations and publications. Where will you leave your digital scholarly footprint? How will you track your research impact? What do you want to be found online about your research?

Reference:

Pasquini, L. A., Wakefield, J. S., Reed, A., & Allen, J. M. (2014). Digital scholarship and impact factors: Methods and tools to connect your research. Proceedings of the 2014 AACE World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (ELEARN) in New Orleans, LA.

Impact Factor, Job Search

What’s Your Research Impact? #ImpactFactor

Laura Pasquini

For those of you who track on me in social spaces, you know that I just completed my tenure as an academic advisor and counselor as of TODAY! This does not mean I will drop off from the advising world entirely, as I serving my term on the NACADA Council, I am a fan of the #AcAdv Chat community, and I involuntarily advise a number of students, colleagues, friends, and family, about academic and career matters on a regular basis. 🙂

syllabus Job Update: I’m Off the Market

I accepted a full-time faculty position with the UNT College of Information, as a Lecturer for the Department of Learning Technologies. YAY! My teaching responsibilities start in mid-August, so I will be sure to share more about this down the road. I will say that my work in both student affairs and academic advising helped contribute to my hire. {Remind me to post about the job search, interview, etc. process later.} All that I have learned about student development and support will DEFINITELY be applied to the online classes I’m instructing this Fall. Thanks #AcAdv & #SAchat!

 

So what am I doing  this summer?

Taking a hiatus from 8-5 office life on campus, to work on a few projects. One of these projects is an EPIC road trip adventure and… RESEARCH! I am contributing to a grant with @drjeffallen to compile a comprehensive literature review, platform information, metric indexes, social spaces, and general research on scholarly impact in the digital age. So far, I have been collaborating with a few researchers to assess and review individual research impact, specifically with regards to open and online scholarship, citation indexing, and alt-metrics.

impactstory

Personally, I have been interested in learning more about this topic as an early career researcher who is a fan of digital scholarship and identity. I was recently added to the Impactstory advisor posse, so now I have some swag to give to fellow research collaborators, who share a similar research impact philosophy. See – I’m still an advisor!

Are you interested in research impact? Do you want to talk about how digital scholarship can influence research, writing, and publication? Let me know. Let’s chat! Follow along this blog, as I am sure to share some ideas, findings, and insights, and I will be tweeting using  #ImpactFactor as my hashtag of choice.

#phdchat, ATPI, PhD, Professional Development, Reflections

ATPI Doctoral Portfolio Reflection

Laura Pasquini

This weekend will involve the usual researching, writing, and editing of projects – however I have one more item to polish up before it’s time to be thankful in the U.S. – my doctoral portfolio.

For the Applied Technology & Performance Improvement Doctorate (ATPI) program, the doctoral portfolio is a new requirement for us young, budding scholars. Rather than sit in a room for two 8-hour days or respond to a set of questions over a period of time, ATPI doctoral students will need to complete our departments Ph.D. portfolio to officially become a Doctoral Candidate and move forward with dissertation work. Some students in our program are still opting to take the comprehensive exam route while they still can, only because the requirements include research, teaching, and service scholarship experience that is akin with academics who might be seeking tenure/promotion. I think that this portfolio makes sense, professionally it helps to document my PhD Journey and encourages students to gain scholarship experience before being launched into a dissertation or even the academic job search.

Here are the ATPI Doctoral Portfolio Requirements [DRAFT] that I have been using to guide my portfolio development. {I say draft as this document is subject to change since our department will have myself and another student defend in December for the 1st time.}

I promise to share my ATPI doctoral portfolio, after I review it and put the finishes touches on it. I learned a great deal from our “dry-run” on Friday, and I was reminded about some of the key things to highlight in my 15-minute presentation. I am also pleased to say that I will be sharing my digital PhD journey (blogging, tweeting, and then some) with my doctoral committee for my portfolio defense. My faculty advisor and another committee member thought it would be valuable to discuss my philosophy and experience as an open educator/scholar/researcher.

In thinking about how to “show case” some of this, I am looking through my blog for musings and what I have been up to over the last 3 years of my doctoral course work. So far my TechKNOW Tools Wordle reflects this:

TechKNOW Tools Blog Wordle

I also know that my digital footprint can be found in my Google Docs (or now Drive), YouTube channel, Dropbox, shared on my SlideShare account, posted on my Flickr account in photos, and even among my 23, 926 tweets (good thing I auto-send these into Delicious with hashtags for easy searching). Time to mine my own digital data, review what I’ve created, and compile my professional development and scholarship.

Grad Students & PhD Friends: How do you track your progress? Professional development? Teaching, service, and research scholarship? Please share!

#phdchat, Open Education, PhD, PLN, Professional Development

10 “Lessons” in Digital Scholarship from @mweller

Laura Pasquini

As a scholar who is lives digitally, connected & open, I have appreciated following along with Dr. Martin Weller’s as he tweets & blogs his ideas for similar philosophies. More recently he has published an open-access, creative commons book – The Digital Scholar.

I was just watching Martin’s recent talk with the LSE on how to engage in digital scholarship, i.e. scholarship that is open, networked and digital. Thanks to the Centre for Learning Technology at LSE for presenting the NetworkEd: Technology in Education Series, you can watch these “lessons” (a.k.a. general ideas and musings about how to be a connected & engaged scholar). @mweller has posted his 10 Digital Scholarship Lessons in 10 Videos to recap the presentation, slides and scoop it page as well:

  1. It’s not just for geeks
  2. Researchers are caught in a dilemma
  3. Interdisciplinary is the network
  4. We’re all broadcasters now
  5. We’re operating in an attention economy
  6. We can rethink research
  7. New skills will be required
  8. It’ll impact even if you ignore it
  9. It’s about alternatives
  10. Don’t focus just on risk

I think that Martin brings up some great ideas of what a digital scholar looks like – and there are many of them already out there. I hope to not only witness, but also be part of this academic revolution. The changing landscape of technology, information and communication is challenging higher education to rethink its approach to learning. Online resources are very social and collaborative, and I hope to see these emerging tools push the academic realm outside of the traditional boundaries and expectations. With current developments in educational technology, learning communities have the ability to enhance peer-to-peer connections, social learning, knowledge sharing, and critical thinking for researchers. When learners/researchers become creators, narrators and digital contributors of their own academic fields, many gain further in-depth meaning and purpose in the learning process.