Networked Participatory Scholarship or Open ... - George Veletsianos

In my blog post explaining scholars' participation and practices on Twitter, I alluded to Networked Participatory Scholarship (yet another acronym!). I have mentioned this on and off over the last year and a half, but I am now pleased to announce that Royce Kimmons (who just became a doctoral candidate – woot!) and I published a paper explaining pressures that exist for educators' and researchers' to participate in digital scholarship and online social networks. Our work complements recent research in the meadow by suggesting that the rise of digital scholarship is not simply due to technological advances. Digital scholarship also relates to social and cultural pressures (e.g., scholars' questioning scholarly artifacts, such as peer-review, and experimenting with new forms of teaching, such as open courses and MOOCs). For this reason, we prefer to reckon about digital scholarship in terms of practices, as "scholars' participation in online social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and otherwise renovate their scholarship."

Here's the abstract:

We examine the relationship linking scholarly practice and participatory technologies and explore how such technologies invite and reflect the appearance of a new form of scholarship that we call Networked Participatory Scholarship: scholars' participation in online social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and otherwise renovate their scholarship. We discuss emergent techno-cultural pressures that may shape higher education scholars to reconsider some of the foundational principles upon which scholarship has been established due to the limitations of a pre-digital world, and delineate how scholarship itself is changing with the appearance of certain tools, social behaviors, and cultural expectations associated with participatory technologies.

We conclude by noting that, "Whether they recognize it or not, scholars are part of a complex techno-cultural system that is ever changing in response to both internal and external stimuli, including technological innovations and dominant cultural values. Though such an understanding may lead to a certain level of trepidation regarding the shape of scholarship's uncertain future, we should take an active role in influencing the future of scholarship and establishing ourselves as productive participants in an increasingly networked and participatory world."

A copy of the paper is also available:
Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (in press). Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent Techno-Cultural Pressures Toward Open and Digital Scholarship in Online Networks. Computers & Education: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.10.001

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Networked Participatory Scholarship or Open … – George Veletsianos