Note to readers

This is a blog that I'm required to keep that's full of unedited, near stream-of-consciousness reactions to similarly required and related readings in a graduate course in N.C. State University's Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program. The way these posts are written help me interrogate and understand what's going on in our readings. I'm identifying what's troublesome so that I can give it more thought, but the posts aren't written in a style that's productive for audiences outside of our class to read. That's by design. I start with contestation, then spend heavens only knows how long researching, recutting, and reevaluating so that I can try and see what potentially productive readings I can extract from these source for use in my own work's contributions back to the field. Comments encouraged, but please, you'll likely need a thick skin if your work is quoted here.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

This is scholarship?



I hate to be an old fogey and all, but are we sure that necessary follows?

There is some editor-like credit that's appropriate for some types of digital administration, but I'm going to need better arguments for other cases than some flavor of "because we're there."

Scholarship is about conversation. Text is a pretty efficient means of capturing and disseminating conversation. If you can't text, can you scholar? I'm 100% about "clear excellence", but one might also have to realize that it's hard to demonstrate clear excellence if there isn't a ready-made peer group to deem your work makes that cut. I'm not sure there's an easy way to address the implied 'failing' that "Over 50% of PhD granting institutions have no experience evaluating new forms of scholarship." Very few Cotton Mather experts in this and any department, you know, and almost never more than two. Scholarship requires that you enter a professional conversation that contains the ability to respectfully self-police.

There, I've done my duty. People now have tripe about which to comment, though they won't. Am I not at 10 yet? ;^)

1 comment:

Susan said...

Yep, my notes from when I was reading were something like, "Huh? Isn't something missing here?" I guess that's what I was getting at in class about the need to think about how we get the academy to begin to rethink how scholarship is defined. It was done once before (Boyer, 1990), and it took about a decade to begin to catch on. But it has. I think it can be done again.

And yes, I'm sure you're well beyond 10. :)