Saturday November 01, 2008 Krause's CV
Change is always slow. The current tenured, experienced professors think "the old way" works well enough and probably don't understand technology enough to grasp, and the changes involved with, how it could be use towards advancing Scholarship let alone the tenure process.
In Steven D. Krause's online article, "Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites" he writes:
"But increasingly, the only significant difference between online journals and their more traditional counterparts is the medium. Online publications often adopt traditional standards regarding peer review and editorial policies, and the articles they are publishing (while often hypertextual) are static in the sense that writers are typically not going back to make changes or include comments from readers."
Of course, I sort of wonder about the tenure process in the first place. From what I understand, tenure was created to protect professors from firing when they researched and published controversial and provocative issues. BUT publications won't publish these things - they want to publish the same old "standard" research, which fortifies the historical knowledge base again and again. There's almost no way for professors to publish provocative, fly-in-the-face-of-tradition research. I wonder if Foucault would have a chance of publishing these days. So why should professors get can't-be-fired tenure when there's no way to publish controversial research? Is it so they can do the research without having to publish? But then no one knows about their research - except if they publish it online.
Krause continues "Web writers/publishers can quite literally skip much of the "fuss" of academic publishing (as Lanham put it), skipping much of the traditional, so-called "gate-keeping" apparatus to reach readers quickly and directly. Their texts can be easily corrected, updated, and changed, and authors can literally enter into a dialogue with readers and other writers who offer suggestions and comments."
Eggsactly. If academia were really democratic, it would open review to both academics and the public, perhaps through using different "accounts" or functions to do so, but offering itself openly to the public would break down the "othering" barriers academia points out and takes issue with elsewhere (ie. North vs South (America), rich vs poor, academia vs. public).
In the examples he gives, they aren't "works", articles. They are reproductions or resource sites albeit those with research and consideration. As a person from industry, I'm not sure how to define "Scholarship".
What would happen if there were an organization that began redefining scholarship - an organization with members from universities etc all over the US, the world, etc that defined this new area, like a think-tank for considering S/scholarship? Part of the conversation could be about expectations for online persistence (to avoid "missing" articles and work!) Sometimes I think these conversations would be better served by coming together for a larger discussion (The Modern Language Association was an attempt but the context isn't large enough). In other words, works like Krause's don't make a dent by themselves but taken together they can make more of an impact. I think the lack of organization in academia is one of it's largest problems. We talked earlier about the CCCC statement on pedagogy and technology. It didn't make a dent --- perhaps because it's a one-off organization trying to make a difference. Get a mob together; they are harder to write off.
Posted by hkvonlud ( Nov 01 2008, 10:22:04 AM EDT ) Permalink Comments [1]