December 17, 2007
Colleges Are Reluctant to Adopt New Publication Venues
Academe has been slow to accept new forms of scholarship like blogs, wikis, and video clips, according to a report that examines emerging technology trends in higher education.
The Horizon Report 2007 predicts that in four to five years, academe will accept as scholarship this kind of interactive online material and will develop methods for evaluating it. The document notes that the change serves to encourage the public to participate in the production of research and scholarly works. An author who posts a draft of his or her book online, for example, can receive immediate feedback on ways to improve the work, the report states. The document was developed by Educause and the New Media Consortium, two higher-education technology groups.
The report also concludes that within one year, social-networking sites will be widely used in teaching and learning, and that mobile phones and virtual worlds will be used in this way in two to three years.—-Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Monday December 17, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
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Colleagues/
I have created a blog titled Scholarship 2.0 that seeks to describe and document the forms, facets, and features of alternative Web-based scholarly publishing philosophies and practices. The variety of old and new metrics available for assessing the impact, significance, and value of Web-based scholarship is of particular interest.
Scholarship 2.0 is located at
[ http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/ ]
Please visit and contribute!
/Gerry
— Gerry McKiernan Dec 17, 12:17 PM #
Colleagues/
Yes. Social Networking Services are Here and Now (But Not as Pervasive as They Should Be) [:-)]
Please visit my Friends blog to read all about the Ever-Increasing Variety of Social Networking Sites/Services that have been implemented in Various Venues.
Friends is located at [ http://onlinesocialnetworks.blogspot.com/ ]
/Gerry
— Gerry McKiernan Dec 17, 12:26 PM #
OK, my turn to give a plug to a blog posting that I put together based on responses that I got to the question “Do You Blog?” — This was sent to several email lists for tourism academics.
http://tourismplace.blogspot.com/2007/05/why-dont-we-blog-university-faculty.html
My own thoughts on these predications is that (1) yes, I can see these innovations taking root on some colleges campuses in their predicted time frames, and (2) double the time lines and maybe they will become commonly accepted at my university.
— Alan A. Lew Dec 17, 07:22 PM #
Those who recognize the potential of Web 2.0 for dynamically sharing scholarly research should counsel patience to overcome natural inertia and the resistance to change. Learning Web 2.0 tools is not difficult, but it’s definitely not a priority for harried academics. And, perhaps more importantly, the system of rewards and benefits must change in order to take advantage of the potential of Web 2.0 as a publishing platform. There are certainly strong commercial interests in traditional publishing to slow the progress of Web 2.0 in academia. There are also important issues to address, such as the ephemeral nature of Web publishing, as well as that of access.
— Roger Brisson Dec 18, 10:07 AM #
In many disciplines of knowledge the difference between oral culture and written culture is highlighted. There are entire societies, even advanced industrial ones, that shun written media and preference oral media. The web is injecting an “oral-ish” form of writing—blogging, wiki-ing, and netsite-profiling, among others. Some of the old distinctions between oral and written subcultures of any traditional culture can helpfully apply here.
Most of us, I suspect, have been fed up, in life, in many venues, times, and occasions, with trying to do thought work, even communicative thought work, in oral formats. Most of us, conversely, have beneffitted by oral bandying about of ideas. Of course this is ruined by most forms of argumentation, with intruding hormonal amplifications of and weightings on points, defenses of points, and attacks of points. One can “win” while both hating oneself and being hated by all one vanquished.
The costs of pioneering in new media are large—abysmal or no archiving, bad or no indexes, quality of contributor fluctuations, and a host of others. The rewards of pioneering in these new oral-ish forms of written conversing is access to many minds and impact on many minds one would never without the web be cost effectively able to contact relevantly. This is a HUGE single factor, probably the largest single factor at stake. I can express a thought and in 30 minutes have 200 people in 42 nations respond, because they found it RELEVANT. Try doing that with any journal or other form of academic publishing at the same speed and convenience and accuracy and feedback-ability for corrections and clarifications. It beats paper media by four or more orders of magnitude. This is BIG in history terms, regardless of how messy its start turns out to be. People seeking neat starts of revolutions are incapable of contributing to them, unfortunately.
— Richard Tabor Greene Dec 18, 11:37 AM #
Scholarly repositories have been touted for over a decade now, but have never lived up to the hype. As long as print journals disqualify any work that has previously appeared in print, repositories will remain the backwater of unpublished materials.
— marci Dec 18, 01:45 PM #
As a clarification, the NMC’s 2007 Horizon Report was released in January 2007, not last week, as it is every year- at the EDUCAUSE/ELI conference. The 2008 report is being finished up over the next weeks.
The purpose of the report is not to be a prediction of the future, but to make some projections about where a majority of learning organizations will be 3 different time horizons. A useful distinction is forecasting versus prediction by Paul Saffo, “Predicting is about certainty, and forecasting is about appreciating uncertainty. Forecasting gives a context for decision-makers to act in the face of uncertainty.”
New forms of publication are but one facet of new scholarship, which is an ongoing initiative across the activities of the NMC.
One of these aspects is open-ness, which is embraced in all the work we do on the project- carried out in a wiki, uses social software in our research gathering, and is published under creative commons.
You can get the most accurate information at http://horizon.nmc.org/
— Alan Levine Dec 20, 04:23 PM #
Thanks Alan. We tweaked the entry to eliminate the time reference.
— wired campus Jan 11, 05:50 PM #