Academic Evolution

Scholarly Communications must be Mobile

Continuing my series on how scholarly communications must transform, I will argue here that scholarship must fit itself to mobile communications in order to be taken seriously in the future.

Of course traditional scholarship must be made available on hand-held devices, but more importantly, the full range of scholarly practices -- research, laboratory work, field work, presentations of findings, and publishing itself -- will all transform themselves in order to conform with the social and intellectual practices of ubiquitous, networked, interactive communication that mobile devices are enabling. The future of scholarship is literally in our hands, and the phone is ringing.

Real Time Scholarship

As I write this post on my iPhone (waiting at the doctor's office), I'm interrupted regularly by the tweets coming from @ScholarlyComm -- reporting live at Columbia University during a conference on the Future of Learned Societies. I'm glad to be a virtual participant, especially since my institution decided against observing Open Access Week, and this is a very exciting time for changing how scholars disseminate their work and conduct their research.

I'm going to send @ScholarlyComm a direct message in a second, suggesting he/she use a hashtag like #openaccessweek to be sure other audiences who would be interested in this conference can join in as I am, via electronic means. As this Twitter reporter sends snippets along, I take a second to search online about the speaker and the learned society he's affiliated with. At my mobile computer (now in a parking lot in my car) I may in fact be getting more out of this than if I were in the room in New York. I combine my listening with casual research that links this speaker's or this Tweeter's interests with mine.

Academic Networking with Twitter

Want to use Twitter to connect with other people sharing similar academic or research interests? Here's a 2 1/2 minute screencast in which I briefly explain one method. Can you suggest other ways, too? (By the way, I used the free screen capturing tool, "ScreenJelly" to create this video).

Scholarly Inquiry Optimization (SIO) - Overview

Open Access is essential to the evolution of scholarly communication, but it's incomplete on its own. It's true that Open Access aims at maximizing the exchange and growth of knowledge, but in practical terms it manifests itself as a defensive effort intent on removing restrictions--as though all that is needed to usher in a new golden age is to untrammel academic publishing from the print worlds' scarcity economics. If the zenith of Open Access is a future in which electronic versions of print articles and books are not inaccessible, then the whole movement is merely in the business of preserving a legacy knowledge system. What if every document since the dawn of writing were digitized and freely available online today? Would we have our utopia? Not yet. That's why we need more than Open Access; we need Scholarly Inquiry Optimization.

Scholarly Mobile Computing: ArXiv hits the iPhone

With the first three iPhone applications now available to serve up scholarly papers from the arXiv.org repository of scientific papers, mobile computing has now officially entered the domain of scholarly communication and is poised to demonstrate the inevitability and superiority of Open Access publishing. What's more, the appearance of bonafide scholarship on smartphones will accelerate the metamorphosis of modern scholarship because the social, geographic, and interactive aspects of mobile computing are going to reshape research, field work, peer review, and the integration of scholarship into formal and informal teaching and learning.

Conventional Scholarship as "Legacy System" and Open Access as "Middleware"

A "legacy system" in the world of computing provides a useful analogy for understanding the precarious state of contemporary academic publishing. This comparison might also keep us from stepping backward in the very act of stepping forward in promoting Open Access publishing and Institutional Repositories. I will argue that, vital as it is, the Open Access movement should really be seen in its current manifestation as academic "middleware" servicing the "legacy system" of old-school scholarship.

Microblogging immediacy trumps Google for search, research

The sometimes cheeky Rocketboom proves it can communicate something spot-on. In this case, comparing the effective value of Twitter over Google (in some respects). A key comment: “Twitter currently controls the most contemporary thought stream humanity has ever seen.” (Thanks to Alec Couros for first posting the video. Follow him on Twitter (@couros) or check out his excellent blog, Open Thinking). 

As I muse about the need for educators to wake up to the intellectual agility and educational riches of blogging, I realize that microblogging is so far beyond the ponder-polish-publish and procrastination model of traditional scholarship that few established academics will allow themselves to catch on to the vitality of Twitter as a research, discovery, and publishing tool for every idea and purpose. But some educators get it. A big thanks to Barbara Lindsey for bringing together a wonderful collection of Twitter resources for educators. Well worth looking at.