Keynote at the European Distance and E-Learning Network Research Workshop Oldenburg, October 2016

A Scholarly Life Online

George Veletsianos, PhD Canada Research Chair & Associate Professor

Royal Roads University Victoria, BC

Canada

•  Academic-specific technologies •  Repurposed technologies

Conceptual framework: Networked Scholarship

Networked Scholarship, or Networked Participatory Scholarship:

“scholars’ use of participatory technologies and online social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and further their scholarship” (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012)

Conceptual framework: Networked Scholarship

Open/Social/Digital Scholarship These focus on a fragment of scholars' online activities and have ignored other aspects of online presence. White & Le Cornu (2011):

Digital Residents & Visitors

Conceptual framework: Networked Scholarship

Post draft papers

Author open textbooks

Share Syllabi + Activities

Live streaming Live-Blogging

Collaborative authoring

Debates + commentary

Open teaching

Public P&T materials

The doctoral journey (e.g., #PhDChat)

Crowdsourcing

Share information

Veletsianos (2012, 2013)

What challenges do faculty face on social media?

•  Social media activities are rife with tensions, dilemmas, and conundrums. –  Time demands –  Surveillance ( à High-profile cases e.g., Salaita, Kansas

Board of regents) –  Maintaining appropriate and meaningful connections –  Gender and socioeconomic issues

– Establishing personal-professional boundaries

What challenges do faculty face on social media?

•  Social media activities are rife with tensions, dilemmas, and conundrums.

“I made it [Facebook] this hybrid space ... and sometimes it's really annoying. … I keep thinking I should be writing or looking at data, [but instead I am managing the different groups of people that are my Facebook friends] … I think that I created the conundrum that I live in now.”

What is the conundrum around expressing academic identity online?

Acceptable Identity Fragments = how academics express themselves online (Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2015)

Significant. Because we imagine our audiences to be complex

Imagined audiences: “mental conceptualization of the people with whom we are communicating”(Litt, 2012)

Disclosures might have deeper roots

•  Disclosures might be tactical – Political – Encourage reflection

(Veletsianos & Stewart, 2016)

So, when institutions view social media with a functional perspective…

•  They become part of an “audit culture” and “a complex data assemblage that confronts the individual academic” (Burrows, 2012)

What do Twitter metrics mean? Can they be used to evaluate a scholars’ reach or impact?

We have to think critically about social media metrics & their meaning

(R2 = .83, F[4,459] = 571.42, p < .001).

From Veletsianos & Kimmons (2016)

To close…

In creating policies that govern online participation, recognize that scholars participating online are not merely disembodied personas aiming to amass citations and followers and that social media metrics may not mean what you think they mean.

Thank you!

Research available at:

http://www.veletsianos/publications

This presentation:

www.slideshare.com/veletsianos

Contact:

veletsianos@gmail.com @veletsianos on Twitter