In abundance: Networked participatory practices as scholarship | Stewart | The Internat... - 1 views
-
Boyer’s (1990) four components of scholarship – discovery, integration, application, and teaching – and to explore them as a techno-cultural system of scholarship suited to an era of knowledge abundance. Not only does the paper find that networked engagement both aligns with and exceeds Boyer’s model for scholarship, it suggests that networked scholarship may enact Boyer’s initial aim of broadening scholarship itself through fostering extensive cross-disciplinary, public ties and rewarding connection, collaboration, and curation between individuals rather than roles or institutions.
-
The way Twitter draws scholars from multiple disciplines and geographic areas together via conversations and hashtags emerged as a clear manifestation of scholarship of integration. Participants demonstrated active engagement with multiple audiences, across fields and disciplines. The accounts that participants connected with in their 24-hour reflections were traced, and in all cases but one participants were found to engage across both geographic and disciplinary boundaries.
-
Boyer (1990) emphasizes scholarship of integration as “research at the boundaries where fields converge…[T]hose engaged in integration ask “What do the findings mean?” (p. 18). Thus scholarship of integration centers on public discussions and negotiations of meaning; what distinguishes the techno-cultural system of NPS is that this happens in constant, abundant real-time. This indirectly reinforces the system’s emphasis on individual rather than institution; the regular unsettling of the boundaries of what is known or understood makes formal hierarchies and categories – tenets of the techno-cultural system of institutional, disciplinary scholarship – difficult to enact and enforce.
-
Bonnie Stewart makes connections between Boyer's four components of scholarship and network participation. She contends that networked engagement fits Boyer's model for scholarship, and broadens scholarship, building connection, collaboration, and curation between individuals rather than roles or institutions. -
A very interesting article! Even though the word "connectivism" isn't used (that I could find), what the author describes is essentially that. I especially liked this quote from the article: "Twitter served as a space for thinking aloud, sharing expertise, and raising investigative conversations. Participants appeared to carve out regular areas of discussion and investigation for which they become known, in their Twitter circles; peers would then send them links on those topics due to their expressed interests, and signal them into conversations in those areas, thereby extending participants' network reach and visibility." Sounds like connectivism in action!
