Scholarly, digital, open: an impossible triangle?

Robin Goodfellow

doi:10.3402/rlt.v21.21366

Abstract

Contemporary approaches to the digital transformation of practice in university research and teaching sometimes assume a convergence between the digital and openness. This assumption has led to the idea of ‘digital open scholarship,’ which aims to open up scholarship to participants from outside academic scholarly communities. But scholarship, digitality and openness exist in tension with each other – we can see the individual features of each, but we cannot make sense of the whole picture. It resembles an ‘impossible triangle’. Particularly confounding is the tension between digital scholarship and open knowledge, where the former is focused on the creation by specialist communities of knowledge of a stable and enduring kind, whilst the latter is characterised by encyclopaedic knowledge and participation that is unbounded by affiliation or location. However, we need not be permanently thwarted by the apparent impossibility of this triangle. It is a stimulus to look critically at the contexts of practice in which a relationship between scholarship, digitality and openness is sought. Constructive examples of such critique can be found in the emerging research field of literacy and knowledge practice in the digital university.Keywords: open scholarship, digital scholarship, research, public engagement, literacy, digital university(Published: 31 January 2014)Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2014, 21: 21366 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v21.21366

Highlights

Contemporary approaches to the digital transformation of practice in university research and teaching sometimes assume a convergence between the digital and openness
Research in Learning Technology is the journal of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), a United Kingdom (UK)-based professional and scholarly society and membership organisation
A national education policy that constructs the public good of the university primarily in the latter terms prioritises relevance and accountability and seeks to ensure these through quality assurance regimes in teaching, and quality assessment, impact and ‘public engagement’ criteria in research

Summary

Robin Goodfellow*

Digital technologies figure prominently in both the private benefit and public participation approaches to opening up the world of academic scholarship Both perspectives tend to promote an idealised view of practice in research and teaching in which digitality and openness converge. A view grounded in the day-to-day experience of academic research communities, suggests that there are important variations in the way that the conditions of digitality and the principle of openness shape specific practice contexts, and that the enduring importance given to objectivity and the ‘scholarly record’ is often in tension with ideas about democratising scholarly knowledge This discussion focuses on the concepts of scholarship, digitality and openness, as three principles important to the development of practice in the university of the digital age.

Research in Learning Technology

Scholarly and digital

Scholarly and open

Digital and open

The tensions in the triangle