Academic Evolution

Western Civilization and the Digital World

Image by Gary Hayes via Flickr

What would you include in an undergraduate course on digital civilization -- a course beginning in the Renaissance and arriving at our current digitally-mediated state of communication, knowledge, and culture? Are there analogs to our digital world in the past? What authors or texts from history illuminate our present? What themes would you address? What fields of knowledge or cultural movements across the centuries have bearing on the digital now? If education itself is transforming, what's the recipe for teaching and learning both in and about the digital age? How would you structure such a course?

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.

Scholarly Communications must be Open

Image by Gideon Burton via Flickr

In this second post in my series discussing how scholarly communications must transform in the digital age, I address the topic of openness -- a concept that includes but goes broader than Open Access publishing. 

Openness is a dominant value of online culture, but not of academic culture, sadly. One would think openness to be consistent with the ideals of a liberal education or academic freedom, but those ideals are endorsed only insofar as content is concerned: one can study or research anything; one may not, however, depart from institutionalized formats, venues, or procedures for making or sharing knowledge (that is, if one wishes to receive academic credit for one's efforts).

The sort of openness upon which online culture thrives is at odds with the way academia has structured the authentication and dissemination of information. Yet scholars are relying upon the digital environment heavily (as everyone now does who has any access to it), sensing new opportunities for knowledge just as others see new opportunities online for business or politics.

Academia wants to have the Internet, but not let it change its exclusive knowledge management practices. It wants to exploit the advantages of online communication without letting such communication challenge its expertise model. But you can't have it both ways. You can't participate in a medium fundamentally built around the concept of openness if you insist on a closed model of expertise and knowledge control. You can try (and academia is trying), but knowledge will simply route around the bad nodes. It comes down to this: the more academia wishes to enjoy the benefits of the digital medium, the less it can hold on to restrictive and closed practices in the production, vetting, dissemination, and archiving of information.

So, within an updated scholarly communications system, just what would "open" scholarship be? It turns out there are several kinds of openness, beginning with Open Access publishing.

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.

Podcast #001: Welcome to the Academic Evolution Podcast

The Academic Evolution Podcast has been launched! The inaugural episode includes my conversation about education and new media with Stephen Humphrey. Click the image to subscribe to the podcast feed if you like, or listen to it here. Please tell your friends! (Highlights and links from the episode follow below.)

Dear Students: Don't Let College Unplug Your Future

Dear students:

I'm about to say something a college professor shouldn't say to his students, but I care about you a lot so I'm prepared to break the code and say what needs to be said: Your college experience is likely to set back your education, your career, and your creative potential. Ironically, this will be done in the name of education. You deserve to know about this! You have what it takes to reclaim, reform, and remix your education. Don't let college unplug your future!

Academic Evolution: The Book

This blog is intended to become Academic Evolution, the book. My model is Chris Anderson, whose Long Tail blog helped bring about his seminal book of the same name. Similarly, I am beta testing my ideas, developing them in keeping with the principle of transparency and with the goal of inviting public review and collaboration. I'm smart enough to know others are often much smarter, and I firmly believe that publishing one's thinking process improves it. So, here's the working table of contents for the book. Obviously I will be making each of these proposed chapters the subject of my various blog posts. Let's figure this out together! I welcome your suggestions: