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Scholarship on the Web

Scholarship on the Open Web

The design of the courses in the MA Leadership program, and possibly others soon, is such that you will be engaging in scholarly discourse in a relatively public forum. The Internet was originally built to facilitate dialogue between researchers at universities and in government, and for many years, that is the purpose that it served. However, as computing power has increased doubling every 24 months, according to Moore’s Law and become exponentially cheaper, commercial interests have taken over as the most influential forces on the web.

These companies have molded the web from an environment that promoted scholarly communication, connection, and collaboration into what has been described as surveillance capitalism characterized by
– the drive toward more and more data extraction and analysis;
– the development of new contractual forms using computer-monitoring and automation;
– the desire to personalise and customise the services offered to users of digital platforms; and
– the use of the technological infrastructure to carry out continual experiments on its users and consumers.
SOURCE

We believe that participation in the current economy of the web-as-surveillance-capitalism is neither desirable nor inevitable in higher ed. That is why we have chosen to use open source web apps like WordPress as opposed to commercial data extraction sites like Google Drive, Facebook, Twitter, or Turnitin.

In the Finding U activity, you will read Kris Shaffer’s posts about digital minimalism, where he writes

In the age of online harassment, fake news, propaganda, and mass digital deception, it is more important than ever to be deliberate about our public digital identity. As my friend Chris Long writes, “It is going to happen. Maybe not today or this week, but eventually, you will be Googled. … When it happens, you will want content you created to appear early and often in the search results.” And I’d add to this (as Chris likely would, as well) that it’s also important that our best content appears in those search results. The things we want people to find when they look us up.

Throughout this orientation, you will begin to practice building a deliberate digital identity related to your studies at TWU. Not only will this help protect you on the web, but it will help you succeed as a scholar on the web.

Characteristics of Scholarly posts

As you know by now, your work for this course, and also for the MA Leadership, will be open on the web. If you have concerns about your privacy, you may have signed up for your blog under a pseudonym, or maybe you plan to take other steps to protect your identity. But, regardless of how you choose to portray yourself online, your posts themselves should exhibit characteristics of academic thought.

Biggs and Collis (1982) describe the SOLO Taxonomy as a way to conceptualize the quality of academic work. They describe five levels of increasingly complex responses:

pre-structural
  • the student response completely misses the point of the question or task
uni-structural
  • student responses describe one characteristic related to the topic or question
multi-structural
  • student responses describe multiple characteristics of the topic but the concepts are not related to each other in any way
relational
  • student responses describe multiple characteristics of the topic in a way that is internally coherent and shows the relatedness of the concepts
extended abstract

In general, all of your academic work should be reflective of either relational or extended abstract levels of the SOLO Taxonomy. At minimum, you should be relating multiple ideas to each other in your post. The concepts that you describe can be your own new ideas compared to how you used to think and how you have changed, or you can contrast ideas from your readings with those of your classmates and your own previous misconceptions. Better than that, however, is extending your ideas to unrelated concepts. One way to do this is to apply your new learning to a problem or challenge in your own personal or professional context.

To continue, click ‘Digital Skills’ in the top menu and read the Overview.

References

Biggs, J. B. and Collis, K. (1982) Evaluating the Quality of Learning: the SOLO taxonomy. New York, Academic Press