Multilitteratus Incognitus

I have to say that I am a bit behind on my self imposed goals for this week in Change11. I had intended to read all of the Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice, but I was only able to read about 4 chapters some were "assigned" through the MOOC, and others looked interesting enough for a side track. The book remains in my ReadItLater list on my iPad so I will probably finish it this week anyway (it's interesting and easy to read, so it shouldn't be a problem). The thing that kept coming to mind while reading the certain chapters (and the chapter devoted to publishing) was the academic carrot or stick: tenure and promotion. If committees that determine your tenure (or non-tenure) and your promotions and merit raises don't value digital scholarship, but rather value the traditional journal, you (as a young budding tenure track faculty member) might be tempted to forsake open scholarship in favor of the closer "norm" for your o...

Despite the fact that I am technically a digital native (BS and meaningless as this term might be) I still cling to paper - perhaps because it's cheap and (up until recently) freely available.  With a plethora of academic articles piling up, and eBooks to read (granted, most are public domain like the Divine Comedy and The Prince), I thought I would shed my reliance on paper this semester and go paper free as much as possible. I am working on a couple of papers, one solo and one with the MobiMOOC Research Team, and there are academic articles that I need to read (or re-read) in order to complete the research. Since I can't print out as much as I did before, I thought this is a perfect time (since we are at the beginning of each research project) to see if paperless is the way to go (for me at least). We are producing digital scholarship (my previous articles can be found on my Scribd account ), but up to now, for me at least, a component of that research was done on paper...l...

This of this blog post as a pre-test: my thoughts on Digital Scholarship prior to reading any of the materials (to be fair, I viewed the intro video by Martin Weller last night).  So this week is Digital Scholarship week on Change MOOC  (is the "c" in this MOOC for "class" or "conference"? lol :-)  ), and the topic on hand is Digital Scholarship; a topic that's been talked about on one of my favorite educational podcasts: Digital Campus . Maybe I am just too literal, but isn't scholarship considered scholarship no matter what the medium? Of course the medium can impose constraints, or it can allow the scholar to include or with with things that are unique to that medium and thus scholarship doesn't just become unidimentional (i.e. papers with words, tables and charts in them) but rather multidimentional, including not just words, charts and tables, but also audio, video, 3D worlds (let's not get in Second Life just now - I don't like ...