In which social scholarship challenges authority
Posted By Kevin Gaugler on November 3, 2008
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In this post, I’d like to expand upon the conversation we had with Bill Ferriter and discuss further how online social interactions between peers has shifted notions of traditional peer-review in higher education. If you have a tenure-track position or hope to have a tenure-track position at an institution of higher education, chances are you have carefully considered the best place to publish your valuable research. An article in the best journal can land you your dream academic job and help you keep that job for life. The metrics we have used to prove the worth of our research and to secure our livelihood has traditionally been pegged to a gold standard often measured in monographs. In other words, the economics of tenure therefore tends to be converted into a currency of book chapters and articles. I have asked myself, for example, “How many articles is a blog post worth?” I suspect that if you are reading this post, it must be worth something to the profession. Maybe the exchange rate of a blog post is .25 articles. Or perhaps it weighs the same as an encyclopedia entry.
Web 2.0, often referred to as the Read/Write Web, presents a challenge to traditional academic metrics since one can now publish one’s thoughts with almost the same speed and ease as reading published work. The blog you are reading, for instance, has not been refereed in the traditional sense. No committee reviewed my work, or offered feedback and no one accepted or rejected my submission. I simply sat down, wrote it and clicked “publish”, eliminating the intermediary. How many articles, therefore, is this process worth? Over time, my work will certainly be vetted by my peers. It might receive your praise or criticism when you comment on the post. It might be redistributed on someone else’s blog. I might be invited to speak somewhere or write an article for a magazine as the result of my writing. Or perhaps my thoughts will lie quietly undiscovered among blogs dedicated to late-night confessions of teenage love and amusing photos of someone’s cat.
In 2000 the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Information Technology disseminated its “Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages“. The document suggests that both candidates and departments remain open to work published with new media and to allow for new measurements of such work when applied to tenure and promotion. Michael Jensen’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education from June of 2007 also offers some specific examples of the kinds of data we might consider when measuring the authority our colleagues have established in a particular field. These new authority models of Web 2.0 might include: Google’s PageRank, page views on Scribd, digging articles on Digg, granting five stars to a video on YouTube or the type, amount and authority of tags used in bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and Diigo.
The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching known as MERLOT has been publishing peer-reviewed language materials online for the past decade. Until recently, their model of authority resembled that of any print journal with a panel of experts that would approve and reject submissions. Recently, MERLOT has also integrated Web 2.0 models of authority by allowing the community of users of the site to create their own peer reviews of submitted work. To see an example of the new ranking system see Barbara Kuczun Nelson’s Spanish lesson on Ojalá que llueva café. I believe that as sites such as MERLOT provide evermore simple peer-reviewing tools for measuring and interpreting the value of one’s work to the profession, rank and tenure committees will grow more comfortable with considering such work when it comes to tenure and promotion. Some research I institutions, in fact, have begun to recognize the metrics of Web 2.0 and to delineate the parameters of authority for material disseminated through new media. The University of Maine’s Department of New Media, for instance, documents a new criteria of tenure and promotion for new media that calls for the consideration of scholarly activity such as: invited publications in electronic journals, virtual conferences, downloads and visitor counts of online material, number and type of online comments of one’s work and Google search returns of one’s research. I highly recommend you watch the following 20-minute talk from Richard Baraniuk at Rice University as you begin to think about the future of scholarship.
If you are still having difficulty coming to grips with the material in this post, Laura Cohen’s presentation on the The Promise of Authority in Social Scholarship (shown below) provided some clarity on the topic for me and might also serve you. If you’d like to delve more deeply into the issue, I also suggest you read George Siemens’ article from March of 2007 entitled, Scholarship in an Age of Participation.
What are your thoughts on a new matrix for scholarly authority, particularly the issue of tenure and promotion in light of Web 2.0 technologies?
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