Showing how valuable nurturing an online presence can be I received a tweet reply from George Veletsianos (@veletsianos) suggesting our academic interests intersect after reading my blog. I agree with virtually all the ideas in his post about 21st Century scholarship and the concept of participatory scholars. One of the few points of difference is that I prefer the term open scholars which covers the opening statement from George about current scholarship:
Rarely do we post in-progress scholarship for public consumption. We usually hoard our research until journals are ready to publish it, at which time it magically becomes a “finished product,” despite the value of sharing, discussing, critiquing, and presenting our thoughts.
He then shares the complete, early version of his paper and expects to gain insight from comments and criticisms of his ideas. More importantly from my perspective he says of the reader/commenter/critic:
I also hope that you will have gained much from this process, both to inform your future scholarship and your online presence and activity.
For me the ability to read and comment on his paper certainly does inform my ‘online presence and activity’ one of the key features of open scholarship.
Again George captures my own feelings exactly when speaking of open scholars:
I argue that participation in online spaces (e.g., communities and networks of practice) is becoming increasingly important and absence from these spaces can be detrimental to scholarship, practice, and personal and professional development.
If George reads my own posts he will find I have never gone to his lengths and published a complete paper/article as a blog post. Rather I have concentrated in each post on a single, small concept/technology/application, one nugget of information, giving my thoughts triggered from an online source such as another post, tweet, Facebook status and so on. Hopefully I will now take succour from George’s example and follow his lead.
