22
Aug
07

Bryan Alexander on New Scholarship: NMC Conversations #5

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By Alan Levine
Categories: Audio and Special Guests

NMC Conversations #5
[download MP3] 21.2 Mb 30:50

Continuing from Conversation #4, we again cover the Horizon Project theme by talking with Bryan Alexander on the 2007 Horizon Report horizon of New Scholarship.

As Director of Research for NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education), Bryan researches and develops programs on the advanced uses of information technology in liberal arts contexts. His interests “concern mobile and wireless computing, digital gaming, and social software. Other interests include digital writing, copyright and intellectual property, information literacy, project management, information design, and interdisciplinary collaboration”. In addition to publishing on NITLE blog’s Liberal Education Today, he posts frequently to his own blog, Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education, travels incessantly for workshops and invited presentations, and publishes his work in places such as EDUCAUSE Review.

Based on discussions we have had with Bryan about connecting NMC and NITLE , and his active participation in our Future of Scholarship Track at the NMC 2006 Regional Conference, we were excited to connect with him for a conversation about one of NMC’s focus initiatives- New Scholarship.

While we started with some talk about the relationship of blogging and scholarship, we arched more broadly to areas of academic practices, publishing, innovation theory, and affordances of powerful tools such as visualization. We might have gone for hours if someone was not watching the clock.

For reference, resources mentioned include:

Read on for a full transcript of this conversation…

Alan Levine (AL): We are now live.

Rachel Smith (RS): I was alive before, I don’t know about you people.

AL: Okay.

RS: Welcome to the NMC Conversations. I am Rachel Smith from the New Media Consortium, and I am really pleased to be doing this again. Last time we had a conversation about activities around the Horizon Report, and we are going to continue the Horizon Report theme this time. We are going to focus on one topic. We are going to talk about New Scholarship. Here on the call with me are Larry and Alan from the New Media Consortium. Hi guys.

AL: Hi Rachel.

Larry Johnson (LJ): Hi Rachel. Glad to be here.

AL: Sorry. We’re talking over each other in tandem.

RS: In stereo. We also have a special guest this time. We have Bryan Alexander, who is the Director for Research of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, or NITLE. Bryan has been on the board of the Horizon Report for the past three years, so he is a major contributor and shaper of the way that the report comes out. Bryan, welcome to the Conversation.

Bryan Alexander (BA): Greetings, and welcome to everybody else. Thanks for having me.

RS: Absolutely. Could you tell us a little bit, Bryan, about what you are up to these days?

BA: Well, I’m, right now, doing several different functions with NITLE. As the Director of Research, one of my responsibilities is what we refer to as environmental scanning. I keep an eye on new developments in technology insofar as the impacts of teaching and learning on the small liberal arts campus. I have a general net to throw wide for the whole world. The second part of that is that I have a portfolio with a few different topics that I specialize in. One of them is Web 2.0 and learning. The second one is gaming and learning. The third one, which has been kind of quiet for a couple years but might be coming back, is wireless and mobile computing and learning. I focus on those. In order to show what I have learned, and in order to share what we’ve discovered through a few different functions, I hold workshops at NITLE-affiliated campuses, I blog, I publish in traditional formats and digital formats. I also do a lot of networking and outreach to other institutions and other sectors. Sometimes this involves talks at other venues. For example, most recently, I have been to venues as diverse as the University of Michigan and the Special Forces Headquarters University. I also do collaborations with other folks like the NMC Horizon Project. I’ve got a few new projects coming down the pike. I’m not going to say any more about those right now, but check the NITLE blog and you’ll see them soon enough.

LJ: Well, I’ll tell you we’re just so pleased to have you on the call with us today, Bryan. We have, of course, been working with you for many, many years, and the work of NITLE intersects with, or parallels, the work of the NMC all the time. Several of the initiatives you mentioned, the educational gaming, the NMC also is very involved in as well. We are really happy to have you with us today. We began talking with you and NITLE about looking at New Scholarship, perhaps collaboratively, back in October, if you recall, when we had that as the focus of our Regional Conference in San Antonio. I know that NITLE has a great interest in that. Of course, as a blogger, all of us follow both you and the NITLE blog a lot, and are always looking for the new insights that can be found there.

AL: Ya, actually, I tend to forget. I think Bryan’s work is of such interest to what we do that I feel like he is in NMC, although NITLE is not officially a member; just the parallels and the overlap. I follow him more on his Infocult blog where he covers an amazing spectrum of technology, culture, gothic stuff, and all kinds of things from parts of the web that I don’t really get to see. He is a valuable part of my network through his blog, and these days also through the kind of chaotic, maybe questionable, but interesting environment of Twitter. I guess one thing is how you look at your work on your blogging, Bryan, as this level of scholarly work. There is some question among some people about what that is, but what I see you doing is uncovering interesting things, documenting them, and composing them. You also publish traditional articles and do more standard scholarly work. I am wondering where this blogging, now that blogging isn’t anything novel anymore, is kind of moving towards in the realm of scholarship.

BA: That is a great question. Thank you for the nice word with Infocult. Infocult has a very strange, diverse audience. I have a Bulgarian following that I can’t quite explain, but am really glad to see, for example. I think blogging right now, I do this, and NITLE does this, for a few reasons, under the rubric of scholarship. One is that, as you say, it is a great way for us to share things that we’ve found. There are other venues for doing that, such as Twitter, such as social bookmarking, but blogging has a few more affordances to it. One is that you have the comment feature, so you can always gather responses from the world, which is excellent. The second is that it gives us the time to annotate, explore, and expand on what we find. What is interesting is that there is this perpetual problem in studying the blogosphere. Valdis Krebs has done tremendous work on this, which is whether the blogosphere is an echo chamber or not. That is, do we tend to only blog about what we agree with, what we like, what we find interesting, and ignore the rest. One of the things that we found is that bloggers tend to link to the things that they can’t stand. They link to their enemies, they link to their opposites, they link to things in order to disagree with them. We are really learning a lot about the broad nature of blogging. It really is social networking beyond immediate affiliations. Another reason that we blog is because it provides a wonderful lived archive of our passage through time. We can look back over a year, over two years, and see what we have been interested in. It’s like looking in a diary in some ways, but a very public one, so that we can get a new perspective on issues that we found a while ago and it went nowhere, which is useful to know. We can also see just when we started paying attention to some things. On top of this, we have been researching how people blog, how they use it in teaching and learning and scholarship, and it’s great to be walking the talk at the same time. One way that blogging fits into scholarship is that it’s a great way to, if you will, workshop ideas, language, and approaches. If you can put out an idea, thesis, or observation and get feedback, that is an excellent way to use the blog to build your own scholarly work. The second way is, as I mentioned, the perspective you get over time from the lived experience of a blog. You can go back and see how your own ideas have changed. There might be concepts that you put out that actually, in retrospect, look quite powerful and you can use to revise what you have done. But, there are limitations to this. There are some cases where your research is of such a nature that you don’t want to share it. Perhaps it is controversial in a way that you find socially counterproductive. Perhaps you wish to approach your research under the head of Intellectual Property Protection, such as a patentable formula. Blogging doesn’t work for all scholarly uses, but for right now, it is definitely a very powerful adjunct.

AL: I am just wondering, I know we want to get to the topic of our talk, about the acceptance and any signs of recognition in academia of this, and two things leap to my mind. Jakob Nielsen’s article about that experts should write articles, not blogs, and, at a recent event I was at among some faculty, more than a few said that they don’t feel comfortable blogging until they are tenured.

BA: Yeah. There are a lot of obstacles for the greater apperception and adoption of blogging among scholars, and the second one is, I think, the larger one. That is, we still have this kind of chicken and the egg problem with scholarly promotion, tenure, and review when it comes to blogging and scholarship. That is, we don’t see a lot of examples of people getting promoted in part because of their blog. We don’t see enough examples of people getting tenured in part because of their blog. Because we see fewer examples, that makes people slightly disincentivised in terms of doing it themselves, which means fewer cases, which means fewer opportunities for to actually be rewarded, and so on. It’s kind of like the junior high school dance, where you have all the boys on one side and all the girls on the other side and no one wants to make the first move. The first problem is…

LJ: I think you’ll find that junior high school has changed these days.

BA: Yeah. Okay, that was a historical comment rather than a political one.

LJ: Yeah. We all definitely got it.

BA: But you know, I said junior high, I didn’t say middle school, right? I’ve already dated myself. My daughter is 12. I am being very practical about these things.

LJ: Oh, yeah, well…

BA: The Nielsen comment is, in some ways, a less powerful one, but a very subtle one. If you haven’t read the article, Nielsen argues that scholarly thinking–and he also argues for more sustained writing like deeper journalism–requires greater length, rather than a snapshot format. There are a lot of problems with this. I mean, one is that blogging is deeply heterogeneous. People feel free to blog a two sentence post or a 3000 word post. Moreover, you have formats where people are blogging pieces of a longer work. I, for myself for example, have been blogging the entire novel of Dracula. This is now the third year. Okay, that’s a scholarly edition. But, you can find works like Pulse, where an entire scholarly peer-reviewed book is being blogged in pieces. I mean, there are many technological affordances for this. You can take a look, for example, at LiveJournal which has the “cut,” and there are many ways that you can do this. I think that Nielsen is too shallow in his characterization of blogging. There are a few other problems, though, which are worth addressing. Do you mind if I get ahead of us on this, or should I come back?

RS: Yeah. Go ahead.

BA: Well, one major problem is what I have been nicknaming the Great Divide in digital architecture or digital politics and the world of culture and academia, which is the divide between the open web and the closed web. The Web 2.0 of wild and woolly conversations rippling across the world, and the world of silos, where you have content that is in some way inaccessible to the larger world. This is a divide that has rapidly erected itself, in that in academia we still don’t have really substantial conversations about it. In fact, I would argue that the majority of our campuses’ populations participating in this divide have already seen their careers shaped and affected by the structures of this divide, and yet have not actually made conscious choices about it. That is something which we really, really need to fix. So, for example, if someone is blogging behind a password, which is trivially easy to do, almost every platform supports this, does that count as a blog? It is a definitional question for blog studies, but also for practical studies. How do we know? Is this going to actually account for it? If a faculty member realizes that there is this divide, are they incentivised to publish their material in a dark archive? Say in a repository on campus for which only people with that IP address can look. Are they going to think “Well, that interesting handout with some new work. Should I put that on the open web or should I put that in a Blackboard space?” I mean, to one extent we have this growing body of work that is not accessible to the larger world, and we don’t even know how big it is. We don’t know how much research is locked away in spaces guarded by Blackboard. We don’t know how much original work is hidden in closed repositories. We have no way of knowing based on the very nature of it.

LJ: That is an interesting point. I am going to turn the conversation a little bit, if I may, Bryan, because I think that one of the things that we’re seeing is that people tend to talk about this new scholarship in terms of technologies. We’ve been doing that just now. We’ve been talking about blogs as a category, where traditionally scholarship has been thought of as an activity, as a collection of thoughts and ideas that are expressed. So in one way, talking about blogging as a form of new scholarship is kind of like talking about “Should I use a typewriter or a pencil?” It’s the ideas, I think, that almost anyone would agree is what counts for a good scholarship. But, what’s new today is the possibility to engage these technologies around those ideas, so that blogs are not just one way. You are able to get responses on blogs. But then, there also interesting things if we just expand from blogs to the larger web, in the way that you can visualize data that can’t be done on a printed page. Flash graphs, the kinds of things that Helmut Rohrer is doing with longitudinal studies of populations, that make those data so easy to understand. Whereas if they were buried in tables, even a very prestigious, well-read journal, I don’t think that the same kinds of understanding could happen. And then, my final point on this is, isn’t that really what research is all about, in one way, is to catalyze even further research? So, to the extent that we can use these new mediums to solicit ideas from the field in response, and visualize things a little better, that is the exciting promise of all this.

BA: Well, yes and no, to every one of your points. I do want to come back to your first point. I do think that it is important not to think in terms of strict technological determinism. That is, should I use pencil and paper or should I use pen and paper; a #2 pencil or #1 pencil? I think we’ve already had detailed politics around this before. We’ve been, for example, if you think about the creation of scholarly journals, which until recently took a lot of capital, so deciding should I publish in a disciplinary journal or an interdisciplinary journal was a major issue, not to mention which kind. The cost of journals, of course, has famously driven the spread of knowledge. I do think that it’s important to break the question back from two into one; is it technology, or is it what we do with it? The fact is that the technology gives us affordances to use. The technology shapes what we do with it and it’s important to see those two combined. So, for example, taking a look at blogging, it matters how we think about who sits on a promotion committee. It matters how you think about who’s writing this at the Chronicle. It also matters what the software lets us do. If you take a look at instant messaging, there is a huge uptick in adoption of instant messaging. Once, instant message platforms enabled easy archiving of conversations. Technology changed and drove a whole series of adoption issues, which brings me to your second point. There is a galaxy of new forms of scholarly publication available. If you think about publishing a GPS data set by itself. We’ve had antecedents for this before. It’s impossible to publish, say, charts and table from astronomical observations. But now, I can take your GPS data set, or your GIS data set, excuse me, and plug it into my copy from ESRI on my desktop, and manipulate it, and then add something new, and perhaps send it to you, or publish it in my blog, or publish it as a derivative work. There is a whole series of exciting options. To your third point, I think the social one is in many ways one of the most powerful, and that is the one that we are still beginning to process. I think the great divide I described really turns on this. We’re not always thrilled with the idea of increased feedback, or increased networking, or increased socialization of our work. Scholarship is indeed deeply, deeply about promulgating knowledge. At the same time, we’ve also had traditions that go against that and mitigate it. The ivory tower tradition is a real one. Look at the University of Paris. One of the reasons why it became an independent authority for a long time was to protect its scholars from the mob and the local government. If you look right here in the 20th century, through the politics in the United States, we’ve jealously protected tenure in order to protect people. Not always well, and in many cases we’ve failed, but we have this sense that scholarship is something to be conserved, as well as to be shared. I mentioned IP, and not just copyright but, specifically, patent issues. There’s another case where people are jealous about, literally jealous about, their scholarship. I once taught a digital narrative, digital story-telling workshop, where a scientist did a wonderful five minute video clip about his chemical work, and he insisted that I only show it to people once it got accepted for publication. It did, and I’ve been showing it ever since. The dynamic is a tricky one. There are all sorts of other issues too. I mean the politics of this. Certain research has political ramifications, depending on where you are. On top of this, there are whole layers of issues with the social spread of knowledge. One more is that we, in the United States, we have had a hard time grappling with the culture of the public intellectual. If Larry Johnson becomes the next great scholar in Texas history, well the Texas historians value the work that he does when he speaks on MPR. They value the work that he does when he speaks in front of the Texas legislature.

LJ: Ah, the Carl Sagan syndrome.

BD: Exactly. Carl Sagan is a great example, because this is a guy who did more for the spread of science than any human being in the past 75 years, and he is probably the most reviled scientist in the same period, just simply because Cosmos changed lives. It changed our culture, and people spit at what he did. It’s a tremendous, tremendous split.

LJ: Well, academia is not immune to the internecine kind of rivalries that you see in other fields.

BD: Well, generally speaking, yes. They are internecine, but also, there is the sense that a scholar who speaks to the public is dividing their time. They are not doing serious work. That is a perception which technology can enable, but that’s one is also part of that new scholarship. If Larry Johnson, the great Texas historian, publishes a GPS data set of, say, the area around Austin, I think most scholars would have a great time checking that out, testing its validity, and using it. But, if he publishes a wiki about his conclusion, and invites the world to edit it in order to help shape it, is this too public? It’s a good question.

LJ: You know, that leads to the final question that we have, which I am going to toss to Rachel because she’s itching to get in here…

RS: Thanks Larry.

LJ: …about when we might see all this. Take it away, Rachel.

RS: Thanks. Bryan, a lot of the points that you just made are so important and have such an impact on the way scholarship is done, and has been done, and will continue to be done. As you know, in the Horizon Report, New Scholarship has been placed on the long-term horizon, where it will be 4-5 years before these kinds of practices are mainstream. What I would like to know is if the trends that you are seeing are consistent with that? Do you think it is 4-5 years out, or not?

BD: I think in 4-5 years we might see about a 33% penetration in terms of production. That is maybe a third of the United States campus faculty producing digital scholarship. I think to cross over into the larger adoption curve, the bell curve, where we’re talking about 60, 70, or 80%, I think might take closer to a decade. There are some powerful demographic forces that have to move and they move a little more slowly than the technology. There is also the time of research, where it simply takes a lot of time to produce a scholarly monograph, or to really track a certain population in the wild. I do think, though, that what we will see within that curve is the flip side of this. When I’ve been speaking with people on NITLE-affiliated campuses across the US, there are very keen on making a difference between production and consumption. That is, the scholars producing these data sets and putting up large theses on the web versus scholars who are consuming digital scholarship, and, of course, students consuming the digital scholarship. In a sense, as Google rewards Web 2.0, and as students continue to be digital creatures, our students are already consuming digital scholarship to the extent that they can get to it, and our faculty, I think, increasingly are. So, within 4-5 years, I think, you’ll definitely see the majority of our faculty accessing digital scholarship, taking a look at it, and even the high-end stuff, looking at simulations, downloading 3D models and viewing it with Quicktime, perhaps visiting a lab site on Second Life where someone has built molecules hundreds of meters long and poking around there. I think the consumption curve will advance before the production curve does.

AL: But, compared to things we have on the horizon, this one is a little bit different. It is broader and it touches all the other horizons. It’s a little bit more difficult to get your hands around than being able to look at multi-player educational gaming or virtual worlds, which is a little bit closer to being about technology. The scholarship just has so many things that it reaches beyond technology to how we work and our social structures. It’s big.

LJ: I think that the take-away I am going to have today, Bryan, from your observations, is that we’re really talking about a social change when we’re talking about New Scholarship. I think that we’re talking about a change in the way that we perceive the very act of knowledge generation and knowledge catalyzation. Your predictions about the timeline, I think, are dead on. One of the things that is interesting about the Horizon Project is that we do talk about the timeline for things to enter into the mainstream. You mentioned 33%. I actually think that is a little high. When we are thinking about what we mean by that, we have got the classic bell curve that everybody is familiar with and Roger’s work from Arizona on the diffusion of innovation, it’s about 16% where most things just don’t reach any further penetration. If you can get into the 20-25% range, you are actually in the mainstream at that point, and it could take decades, as you observed, for it to really become ubiquitous. Very, very few things actually have made it to the 80-90%.

BA: Well, there’s e-mail, and that’s a big step.

LJ: Yeah.

BA: You have to take a look, I think, at one of the issues here that I mentioned, in terms of the great divide, is also recognizing certain things as digital scholarly activities. The whole H-net series of professional e-mail listers for scholarly purposes, for example, has been around since the 1990’s, and that’s a solid network of scholarly work that’s shared and discussed. I think that 20% is good. I think it matters, in part, which 20%. If you’re talking in terms of scale-free network analysis, if the 20% are the hubs, the connectors, then this might take off. One thing you might see along those lines is certain disciplines really taking off and others not.

LJ: Yeah, I agree with that.

BA: So you might see this more in foreign language.

LJ: Yeah, I think the sciences are actually pretty far out in front on some of this simply because the pace of change in those fields is really driving the way that they think about how they distribute their knowledge.

BS: It’s the face of change, Larry. I agree that it’s a huge, huge issue. In fact, Connecticut College did this great project where they had visiting scientists speak about new developments in their fields, and the publication for those speeches was CD-ROM. The reason for that was they didn’t want to maintain something on the web because it would be out of date within a year. They liked the time-bound nature of a disc.

RS: Wow.

BA: I’m sorry, Rachel. Go ahead.

RS: I was just going to say that this is definitely something that we are all going to keep following with interest as it changes and moves.

LJ: I think, too, that organizations like NITLE, and to the extent that we can in the NMC is hoping to try and do some things like that, is to help people understand what’s good. How do you recognize quality when some of these things are all so new?

BA: That’s one of the things that’s come up in NITLE conversations was should other groups serve as advocates for digital scholarship because there is no other body that will do it.

AL: I’m willing to, maybe, start collecting the bets. So, with digital and New Scholarship; are we at 33% in 4-5 years? Who wants to take 20%? We’ll get it up in Vegas on the boards.

RS: Okay, so I guess that makes Alan the New Scholarship bookie.

BA: Keep in mind that a recent Ithaka survey, which was taking a look at faculty attitudes toward libraries, had faculty use of blogging and Web 2.0 tools at between 2-4%, so this may take longer.

RS: Wow. There’s a ways to go.

BA: Larry, I think that your point about collaborative groups is really enormous. I think if you saw the Ithaka study on scholarly publication, one of the points that they were keen to make is that they think that some activities in scholarship are going to move towards inter-institutional collaborative platforms, simply because it no longer makes sense economically to have some things redundantly repeated across multiple university presses or multiple campuses. They also call for, let me see if I can find this, a 3rd party enterprise, or at least a catalytic force, in order to enable the whole list to function. It’s for marshalling resources, helping institutions find their place in your systems, leading the community towards shared visions of scholarly communication landscapes, and so on.

RS: I just wanted to thank you very much for your time today. Bryan has joined us from his home in rural Vermont. Bryan, I am pleased to say, is down for another year on the advisory board of the Horizon Report, so we’ll continue to have your insights. If you haven’t read the Horizon Report and you’d like to find it, you can find it at horizon.nmc.org , and Bryan, of course, blogs at infocult.typepad.com . Thank you so much, Bryan, for joining us today.

BA: Don’t forget the NITLE homepage, where the Liberal Education Today blog can be found right there on the page.

RS: Absolutely. Thanks everybody. Thanks Larry and Alan.

LJ: Thank you, Rachel.

BA: Thanks Rachel, thank you Alan, and thank you Larry.

RS: Until next time.

BA: Bye bye.

LJ: Alright, bye now.

1 Response to “Bryan Alexander on New Scholarship: NMC Conversations #5”

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  1. 1 Gerry Bayne Aug 22nd, 2007 at 3:29 pm

    Hi Alan-

    I wanted to let you know that we just published an interview with NMC’s Rachel Smith on the “Role of Play and Preparing for a Changing Student Population”. Here’s the link:

    http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/podcasttheroleofplay/44985

    Cheers,
    Gerry Bayne
    Multimedia Producer
    EDUCAUSE
    gbayne@educause.edu

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