Open, participatory online learning and scholarship don't necessarily require credentials as the price of admission, but do demand the construction, performance, and curation of intelligible, public, networked identities. Both academia and social networks are, in effect, ‘reputational economies,' but while scholars and educators are increasingly exhorted to go online, those who do often find that their work and efforts may not be visible or understood within institutional contexts. Likewise, as the academic tradition grapples with sea changes in infrastructure and communications, the terms by which scholarship and learning have been defined and legitimized are being unsettled from within. What signals count as credibility among networked educators and learners? What risks and power relations need to be addressed as part of that process?
7. "For the first time in human history, two related
propositions are true. One, it no longer
is possible to store within the human brain all
of the information that a human needs.
Second, it no longer is necessary to store
within the human brain all of the information
that humans need.
Education needs to be geared toward
the handling of data rather than the
accumulation of data.”
- Berlo, 1975
16. knowledge abundance enables us
to create ourselves as network
nodes, forming webs of visible (&
invisible) connections
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21. Those within the academy become
very skilled at judging the stuff of
reputations. Where has the person’s work
been published, what claims of
priority in discovery have
they established, how often have they been
cited, how and where reviewed, what
prizes won, what institutional ties earned,
what organizations led?
Willinsky, 2010
37. matter-ing matters
Sometimes…I’ll choose
someone with twenty
followers, because I come
across something they’ve
managed to say in 140
characters, and I think “oh,
look at you, crafting on a
grain of rice.”
- @KateMfD
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44. two projects
Palo Alto, CA
October 16th & 17th, 2015
http://linkresearchlab.org/dlrn2015/call-for-proposals/
Madison, WI
http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/
45. what signals will you send?
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Well yes, I say. There’s scholarship. And there’s what people had for lunch. And I study the intersection of the two.
And it’s more than just putting work online.. It’s a stretching beyond your institutional role to create identity positions within audiences and networks you may not have known were there…through ongoing networked practices.
Influence is how we determine the reputation and credibility and essentially the status of a scholar. There are two ways we assess influence: there’s the teeny little group of people who understand what your work really means…and then there’s everybody else, from different fields, who piece together the picture from external signals: what journals you publish in, what school you went to, your citation count, your h-index, your last grant. Things people recognize and trust.
Reputational logics
When we talk about influence and reputation and credibility, we are always talking about tangibles and intangibles. In institutional structures and in networked structures. Each of you here has a pretty clear sense of what influence markers count in your field: how to be a credible academic within the institutional context. But influence that has its origins not in premier journals and gatekept structures, but in the free-for-all of online networks?
New technologies gives us new ways of signaling to each other