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Would you buy a book from this man?
My book, The Digital Scholar, has finally come out. When I was looking round for a publisher year ago, it was an absolute requirement that they do open access (at least one chapter of the book is a rant against academic publishing models). Bloomsbury Academic offered this and are also a reputable publisher and handled the process very well. In a rare demonstration of putting my money where my mouth is, going for an open access publisher means the royalty is much reduced from previous publishers, so it's not a path to riches, but I accepted long ago that writing academic books was somewhere on a par with flying kites…
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Digital scholarship = unspoiled holiday destination
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanjibm/3306287621/ by Sanjibm> At last week's digital scholarship debate Rory McGreal raised a point that has often nagged at me. He said he didn't want blogs and other forms of outputs to be recognised, not because they weren't part of scholarly activity, but because he didn't want them to go the same way as journal articles. There is something in this – we have refined and controlled the writing process to such a degree that it is not a very pleasurable activity. Sometimes writing a good paper does feel as though you are doing something creative and worthwhile, but often there is an element of duty about it ("I need to get…
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Categorisation angst, the monoamorous and Google+
Yes, we're all playing with Google+, and I suspect blogging reactions to it, but this is not one of those posts (quick verdict: it's immediately better than Buzz/Wave, and Circles combined with Hangout could be very useful for research teams, institutions). No, what this post is about is the categorisation dilemmas that tools such as Google+ generate, and our relationship with technology. In terms of categorisation my first dilemma was whether work colleagues count as 'friends'. I chatted to George Siemens about this and he concluded he didn't have friends, just colleagues (or colleagues who are also friends). I'm in a similar position, or at least my online self is.…
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Digital scholarship recognition – the debate
So, I was the invited keynote debater at this year's EdMedia conference in Lisbon. I had ten minutes to put my case in favour of the following motion: "This house believes that in the next decade, digital scholarship (in open journals, blogs, and social media) will achieve the same status in academic settings as traditional scholarship" My (poor quality, one take audio) slidecast is below. Digital scholarship debate View another webinar from Martin Weller My argument was that there are a number of converging pressures which will make recognition inevitable. These were: 1) Impact 2) Efficiency 3) Efficacy 4) Complementarity 5) Institutional benefit 6) Variety 7) Human factors Antonio Figueiredo…
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What can I take away from DS106?
I think we can say that Jim Groom's Digital Storytelling course has been very successful in generating an online buzz, and as a model of what you can do with an open, online course. The development of DS106Radio has been something to behold as it has taken on a life of its own. As D'Arcy has commented most of the technology for this has been around for a while, but it all seemed to coalesce into something quite magical. Jim has some thoughts on DS106 radio here, arguing that it "provides is a model for yet another platform for sharing, creating, and trying to foster conversation." I've been thinking about…
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Eportfolios – J’accuse
This is a bit kicking a man when he's down as most people have turned away from eportfolio software now, but it still persists. It's also old hat – Jim was telling us this ain't your eportfolio mama, three years ago. But maybe now is a good time to reflect. I would like to one day do a series of posts about collective fantasies that grip educational technology, and why they don't turn out the way we envisage (learning objects anyone?). This post was set in motion by an email from a colleague asking whether I thought blogs were better means of achieving portfolios than specific eportfolio systems. I answered yes,…
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10 things I learnt from Flickr Photo a day
This time last year I was feeling a bit down, and thought I needed a bit of a challenge to motivate myself. So I started the Flickr photo a day thing. If you haven't seen this, the clue is in the title – you aim to take a photo a day for a year. You don't have to upload one a day (I didn't always have connectivity), but you have to take one a day and you have to take it. That's all. So what did I learn from the process? 1) I'm not a very good photographer 2) I didn't really improve as a photographer much in terms of…
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A pedagogy of abundance – the paper
I've given a couple of talks (and blogged) around a pedagogy of abundance. In these I was exploring what abundance in terms of content might mean for education, and whether we had appropriate pedagogies, when most of our learning theories have been built on an assumption of content-scarcity. For my digital scholarship book I made this the chapter that looks at the teaching element of Boyer's scholarly functions. I have now redone that chapter and published it as an article in the Spanish Journal of Pedagogy Note – the journal isn't open access, but I'm trying to explore the green, or self-archiving route of OA, so I got agreement to…
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Views on a book
I have been completing the index for my digital scholarship book and thought I'd share some thoughts on different views of the book. I put the entire text through Wordle to produce the following tag cloud: I then restricted this view to only 50 words: And by way of comparison, here is a draft of the index in Scribd: The Digital Scholar – Index Two questions arise for me: do these representations reveal anything to me, as author? And do any of them provide useful insight or make you as potential reader, interested? The word clouds contain some pretty obvious terms (if digital, open or scholarship weren't in big letters,…
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Online rep manager = American cheese loaf
This is all the way wrong… <Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/wordridden/205945730/> John Naughton pointed me at this article in Nature about academics managing their online reputation. In a loose sense we all manage our identities, particularly online where it has the possibility of going beyond the current context. But the tale of people employing online reputation management companies made me sigh/smile/rant in equal measure (not a pretty facial contorsion I can tell you). If you need to _employ_ a company to manage your online identity then you really haven't grasped it at all. It is exactly about connecting with you, and not some media company. Rather like 'white pop reggae' and 'American cheese loaf',…
