The Future of Scholarship

The piece presented below is a working document that will form my portion of a panel discussion on the future of scholarship. The panel will take place in late-April as a part of Alfred University’s Bergren Forum series. I will be joined by two of AU’s librarians–Ellen Bahr and Mark Smith. I am open to any comments and suggestions as we prepare our presentation.

I would like to begin today with a broad claim.

All channels of communication possess scholarly potential.

The term channel is a basic component of any model of communication. In the simplest sense, communication involves the transmission of a message from a sender to receiver. The channel carries the message from the sender to receiver.

For example, right now I am using my voice as my primary channel of communication but within this presentation the voice will be supplemented with other mediated channels, like print, video, and audio.

Within our society, we tend to hold some channels in higher esteem than others. The legitimacy of a given channel is usually based its history and our perceptions of who controls the channel (e.g. professional versus amateurs).

For example, as a channel of communication printed academic journals have historically relied on the peer review process. Within this process, aspiring and established scholars compete for space within the journal by having a panel of other scholars (i.e. professionals) judge which pieces are most relevant and most groundbreaking. It is understood that almost everything between the covers of an academic journal is scholarly. The professional control of the journal establishes this fact.

In contrast, a channel of communication like YouTube is generally considered non-scholarly (i.e. amateur). Control of this channel is minimal and there are almost no barriers to having your work appear here. However, does this mean that YouTube does not house scholarly work?

The answer to this question is simple. No YouTube does, in fact, house scholarly materials.

Let’s take a quick look at this video by Kansas State anthropology professor Mike Wesch. Wesch describes his video this way, “This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”

Dr. Wesch was honored as professor of the year for his innovative efforts. Of course, Wesch makes his work available through numerous channels and has not abandoned traditional forms of scholarship. Accepting new forms of scholarship does not suggest that traditional forms of scholarship should be abandoned. Instead, what I am suggesting is expanding the accepted forms of scholarship.

Part of the problem in accepting this proposed expansion involves a predisposition to the printed and physically published word. Historically speaking, the printed word has a longer history and we tend to compare all new channels to established channels. Of course, books and journals provide some opportunities that audio and video do not, but the reverse is also true.

Steven Johnson explains our cultural bias toward the printed word by flipping the script and hypothetically wondering what we would say about books if videogames had come first. Johnson writes:

“Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices…

Books are tragically isolating…

These new ‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers…

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path…For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing.

This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.” (excerpted from Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You p. 19-20)

Please realize that Johnson is not saying that the book is a lesser form than videogames. Instead, Johnson simply says they are different.

So what, you may ask?

Different channels possess different challenges and different opportunities. Because of this, different channels require different manners of evaluation and consideration. Learning to read words is not enough. We must learn to read channels. As Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.”

Do these differences mean that one channel is necessarily superior to another? Once again, the answer is simply no. It means that they are different and contributors and readers need different skill sets to create and evaluate the messages that are contained within these more open, or lesser controlled, channels.

This claim brings me back to the beginning and I’d like to briefly address control. As scholars, we are often criticized for existing within impenetrable Ivory Towers. We have controlled dissemination of and access to the knowledge that we possess. Knowledge is presumably our product and we shouldn’t just give it away—or should we?

In his book Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky writes, “Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession” (69).

It is my belief that the loss of control of knowledge should be embraced rather than feared. In its most basic sense, we should be in the business of spreading knowledge rather than controlling it. The opportunities presented by new forms of scholarship undoubtedly represent some loss of control, but they also offer new opportunities for scholars. For example, some of the potential advantages to web-based scholarly efforts include:

• The ability for scholars to communicate to larger and more diverse populations.
• The ability for larger and more diverse populations to communicate directly with scholars.
• Multiple access and entry points to our work.
• The ability to discuss timely issues in a more timely fashion.
• If properly archived, then this work is better preserved.
• Boundary-less collaborative opportunities (e.g. peer-to-peer review, wikis, collaborative blogs etc.).
• The opportunity to include multimedia elements when appropriate.
• The reduction of monetary costs often associated with producing and accessing academic knowledge.
• The ability to directly connect our work to the works of other scholars via hypertext linking, and for other scholars to connect their work to ours.
• An enhanced opportunity to promote the work that we do through tagging and RSS feeds.
• Individual scholarly works can exist dynamically rather than statically.

I realize that several of these “advantages” will present real challenges for promotion & tenure committees. However, it is in this environment that the communal pool of knowledge can grow exponentially deeper while spreading further and faster, but first we must fill that pool. In order to do this, we need to consider expanding the acceptable forms of scholarship.

Explore posts in the same categories: Teaching, Technology, Web 2.0

Tags: Chad Harriss, Clay Shirky, Ellen Bahr, Mark Smith, media literacy, Mike Wesch, New Media, pedagogy, Scholarship, Steven Johnson, Teaching, Technology, Web 2.0, YouTube

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.