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Yesterday, I sent a link to my faculty of the “Top 100 Liberal Arts Bloggers.” I recognized quite a few of the names and thought that it might make interesting summer reading. I, in fact, billed it as such–like beach reading. I got a response pretty quickly from someone saying that he/she was disappointed that the blogs weren’t scholarship and that the list just confirmed that blogs are worthless.
Sigh.
Where do I begin? First of all, I would say that most academic blogs are not written with “traditional” scholarship in mind. If academic bloggers do address their field, they often do so with a lay audience in mind. As Michael Wesch said of his YouTube work, he’s reaching millions of people, different kinds of people than he would reach with his work published in an academic journal. In fact, that’s why I appreciate certain blogs, like the blogs at Scienceblogs. I get a sense of fields there’s no way I would understand if I read the journal articles. Another way that these blogs come at scholarship is by addressing issues in the news. Stories about science or economics can be expanded upon (or corrected) by experts. Is that or isn’t that scholarship?
Secondly, there’s more to life than scholarship, at least of the detailed kind I think my correspondent meant. Many of the academic blogs I read discuss work-life balance issues, problems within higher education more broadly, issues in their fields of study, politics, and yes, sometimes just plain old stuff. Is there anything wrong with that? Isn’t that somewhat interesting and something we should take time to think about? Shouldn’t we wrestle with the problems that an antiquated system brings to bear on current faculty? Shouldn’t we talk about what education means, what being an academic means, how to have a life and a life of the mind? But that’s not scholarship . . .
And so what if it’s not. So what if we can definitively say that in no way are blogs ever to be called scholarship? Do faculty not ever read the New York Times, the New Yorker, Harper’s, Time, Newsweek, watch the evening news, a movie or two? Are those bad things? Not intellectual enough? Are faculty not allowed entertainment?
I personally think we need to expand what we mean by scholarship anyway. I think we can still say that a certain kind of scholarship needs to be done (maybe), the kind written for the narrow group of people interested in a topic and published in journals reviewed and read by those same people. But I think there’s room for much more–critiques of the industry of higher education, discussions of teaching and grading practices, discussions of news or of peer-reviewed articles. I think blogs bring academics out of the ivory tower and I think that’s a good thing for both the academics and for the people who read their blogs. It ups the level of public discourse. I feel sorry for those who feel they should remain ensconced in the ivory tower and don’t engage with the world. Their work may become increasingly unknown and irrelevant.
Friday’s Chronicle posted this article suggesting that web sites should be reviewed and certified by scholarly organizations so that they can be “counted” by tenure and promotion committees. I was bristling as I read this, thinking that Olson missed the point of electronic scholarship entirely. And, as it turns out, Barbara Fister at ARClog expressed what I was feeling much better than I could:
The fact is, these are two entirely separate issues. The quality of websites can be evaluated – and peers already do that. Whether academics are willing to broaden their notions of what counts as scholarship and to consider electronic projects as serious work is another matter altogether. Replicating a cumbersome print-based peer review mechanism, flaws and all, is not the solution. Doing the real work of evaluating a colleague’s scholarship – without relying on university presses and journals to do the vetting for them – is what’s called for. Oh, and a more imaginative and open-minded definition of what scholarship is.
I was thinking all along about stories of abuse in the peer review system, one most egregious case outlined at Adventures in Ethics and Science. The proposal for evaluation assumes a lot of things. First, that these scholarly organizations would know a good web site when they see one. And two, that they’d be unbiased in their review process. Given that the problem trying to be solved is the “generational bias” that may exist on T&P committees, are the faculty sitting in positions at scholarly organizations any different?
On the plus side, it could provide validation for work that isn’t getting validation right now. If a stamp of approval is what it takes to move us toward that validation, then maybe it’s the right way to go.
I guess what I don’t want to see is the same old scholarship being the only thing that gets “approved.” There is some interesting work being done in other forms that deserves attention. The latest Kairos issue, for example, includes video and powerpoint slide decks. And Kathleen Fitzpatrick is putting her work that discusses this very issue on her blog. There is a place for both kinds of work, I think, and it may be that one wins out over the other, 20 years from now. However work online gets validated, we really do need to take some steps in this direction. Otherwise, we risk becoming irrelevant.
I just finished up my part of a panel with Tim and Kathleen and am now sitting in a session being started off by a couple of my Haverford colleagues. The topic of scholarship and digital media or web 2.0 is one I’m particularly interested in; however, I often feel that I can’t say anything much about it because of the role I currently occupy. Although I consider part of what I do scholarship, I don’t think many others would consider me a scholar. I’m not sure I want to be a scholar, at least not as it’s currently conceived–the isolated individual hunched over books (or maybe more contemporarily, the screen). So I think I come at the topic from a place outside of the existing community and that makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
I have to say that I felt my talk did not go as well as I wanted it to. It followed quite nicely from Kathleen’s and Tim’s, but I felt that I hadn’t quite organized my thoughts in a way that took good advantage of that. I didn’t have notes. Most of the time, I can work without notes, but I don’t think it worked quite as well this time. But I learned something from it and its juxtaposition with Tim and Kathleen’s talks.
Here’s what I learned, or what I’m chewing on right now. The real work of scholarship takes place in isolation and through individual work. From that isolated position, isolated works get created and those works are read only a few people. There are exceptions to this, of course, and the sciences are much more collaborative than other disciplines, although they also are at greater risk of being scooped than humanities faculty, for example. In my work field, instructional technology, much of the thinking and work that looks like scholarship happens online, via blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. And that’s one of the things that draws me to the field. I like thinking out loud with others. I feel more comfortable moving the thinking and scholarship that happens online within the ed tech community into formal publication than I would going from online to formal within rhetoric and composition field.
Partly, of course, it’s because I’ve lost touch with that scholarly community and what I know of it from reading and contact I’ve had with people in the field, it’s both going in directions that interest me and in directions that really don’t interest me. Honestly, I think to some extent, I’m skeptical of scholarship in many (most) fields. I find some of it very valuable, but the way that scholarship is produced and the reasons it’s produced (for the sake of getting tenure and promotion, maybe to forward the field, maybe to say something new) tend to make it less valuable to me personally. Again, I’m speaking from a position where I’m likely to get condescending or patronizing comments. When scholarship is valuable to me, it’s when its context is clear, something Kathleen discussed at length. In other words, its links to other works are clear, the links back to it are clear, what people are saying about it, what they think of it are all brought out of the footnotes, out of the scholarly literature and made visible. As it stands now, there’s a lot of work an individual needs to do in order to figure that out. I think the reason these links, this context isn’t more visible for most works in most fields is not because it’s not possible, but because it serves a gatekeeping function.
I think I need to chew on this more and I think the talks I’m listening to are going to give me some more thoughts and ideas. Part of why this is all in my head is not just because I’m at a conference on the topic, but also because I’m thinking about what it means for me to be a scholar. I’m not willing to follow the traditional rules, and as I said in my talk, I feel disoriented as a result.
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