Michael Eburn

Paul Maharg

paulmaharg.com/slides

‘Writing out loud’: blogging and the rhetoric of web thinking/writing

preview

1. Digital media

2. Blogs and Wordpress

3. Example 1: Paul Maharg’s blog

4. Example 2: Michael Eburn’s blog

5. Bibliometrics > altmetrics

6. Some (personal) conclusions

what is blogging?

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.Andrew Sullivan @

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/why-i-blog/307060/

why should we care about this?

What scandalized the serious scholar Erasmus (as it fascinated Durer) was the fact that, not much more than half a century after the first appearance of the printed book, demand had turned it into a product beyond the control of the scholars and specialists. The book had taken over as the transmitter of European written culture, before scholars and educators had had time to come to terms with its power and influence.

(Jardine, 1996, p. 228)

why should we care about this?

What scandalized the serious scholar Erasmus (as it fascinated Durer) was the fact that, not much more than half a century after the first appearance of the printed book, demand had turned it into a product beyond the control of the scholars and specialists. The book digital revolution will take over as the transmitter of European written culture, before scholars and educators have time to come to terms with its power and influence.

(Jardine, 1996, p. 228)

1. Digital media

digital media

Pros Cons

Wide dissemination, remains at a more or less fixed place for readers to return &download, etc

Can be time-consuming & addictive; are you getting to the people you want to read your stuff?

Gathering, sorting, archiving of digital information very useful

Apps disappear or go corporate

Builds academic profile through altmetrics Can encourage narcissism & grandiosity if used as vanity projects

Facilitates the Open – open access, open education, OE resources

Privacy can be an issue (cf Facebook)

Supports knowledge as a public good Do we want that? Should knowledgealways be public?

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deeper issues

1. What’s digital?Specific devices, networks, assemblages? Technical, educational, research affordances, modes of text and search, specific skills, competences, practices, environments?

2. How does digital alter social?Eg distributed communities, socio-material understandings, means of production & modes of use

3. How does digital (+ social) alter literacies?Eg artefacts and practices, formal and informal contexts of research, visual artefacts, digital curation.

4. How does digital encourage metricization of our working lives, and what can we do about it?

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transforming features of digital…

– Replicability

– Mutability

– Connectivity

– Instantaneity (& the ‘nearly now’)

– Portability

– Identity (Jones 2013, 162-65)

All of which are key features of blogs.

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and now impact comes over the horizon

In REF2014, it meant evidencing a narrative that was:

Instrumental• Influencing the development of policy practice or service provision

• Shaping behaviour

• Altering legislation

Conceptual• Contributing to our understanding of the above

• Reframing debates

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Capacity-building• Technical/professional skills development

Cultural change• Increased willingness to engage in knowledge exchange activities – by

individuals, and/or institutions

• Changed mindsets

Enduring connectivity• Establishment of enduring academic / non-academic relationships –

indicator of potential future achievements or impacts

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2. Blogs and Wordpress

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publishing platforms: blogging2

3. Example 1: Paul Maharg’s blog

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why do I blog?

http://paulmaharg.com

17.3.2005 > present. Originally Typepad, now Wordpress. Used for:

• Dissemination of ideas & research

• Construction yard for sections of papers & articles

• Sky-writing (Steven Harnard)

• Identity formation

• Reflections, insights

• Statement about use of digital for serious exploration

• Connecting on Blawg

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some stats3

somestats3

publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter

http://slideshare.net/paulmaharg

Used for:

• Dissemination of slidedecks

• Set alerts for others’ presentations

• Re Twitter, use third-party apps & aggregators, eg TweetDeck to manage the dataflow

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publishing platforms: slidedecks & Twitter3

including pre- / post-conference chat3

some slideshare stats3

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Blog + slides + digital collections

• See http://bit.ly/1jUx36K

4. Example 2: Michael Eburn’s blog

Australian Emergency Law

• Why blog?

• Choice of platform.

• Who's reading it and how often?

• My [ie Michael’s] practice.

• Reflections.

Why blog?

• To learn how.

• To claim the territory.

• University outreach.

Choice of platform

• Wordpress allowed:

– easy setup;

– sharing with and ;;

– export to(but that’s stopped working);

– a statistics page;

– allows readers to comment (subject to approval).

Who's reading it and how often? March 2013

• What?

– 147 posts.

– 353 comments.

• Who?

– 301 followers on

– 140 on

– 204 connections on

– 645

Who's reading it and how often? October 2015

• What?

– 477 posts.

– 1274 comments.

• Who?

– 1067 followers on

– 909 on

– 328 on twitter

– 638 followers on

– 2942

+ 330

+ 921

+ 766

+ 769

+ 328

+ 434

+ 2297

Where have they come from in 2015?

In the week 2-8 October

• I made 10 posts.

• My blog ‘reached’ 23 683 people via Facebook.

• 2424 of them ‘engaged’ by clicking ‘like’, making a comment or sharing the post.

• Add the followers on WordPress and LinkedIn and it was received by not less than 25 061 people – in one week!

My Practice• Blog regularly, at least once a

fortnight.

• The blog is a site for discussion so I:

– Invite questions (and ask for permission to blog the answer);

– Respond to comments;

– Edit the obvious errors;

– Maintain nettiquette; but allow robust discussion.

My Practice

• Link to sources.

• Adhere to academic and legal honesty.

Reflections

• The readership is larger than I ever imagined;

• The feedback is (so far) all positive;

• Of all the writing I do, I think this has the widest reach and highest impact (but no DEST points);

• It's become my notebook.

It has opened huge doors

• I’m invited to travel around Australia and the world because of the blog.

• For example, next week I’m off to Western Australia and the Gold Coast to speak to

– The Navy;

– WALGA and LGIS; and

– National meeting of SES volunteers associations.

It has impact…

• I’ve been consulted by Governments and emergency services on law and policy;

• The blog’s been cited (but I can’t point to a metric on that).

• Senior officers use it and rely on the blog!

Comments –

• “Everyone reads it”;

• “You have a cult following”;

• “Michael Eburn may not know many people in this room, but we all feel we know him”; and

• “You’re not Michael Eburn are you?”

5. Bibliometrics > altmetrics

altmetrics…?

See altmetrics.org:

‘the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship’

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existing impact: how we are judged

Existing filters:

• Peer-review

• Citation countingeg h-index

• Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

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existing impact: how we are judged

• … of a journal: A measure of the average number of citations to articles published in science & social science journals in a 3-year period (Eugene Garfield, ISI). Calculated annually for the journals indexed in Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports.

• Calculation: number of times articles were cited in indexed journals divided by number of items published in journals.

• Pressure on authors to enter high-ranked journals

• Pressure on journals to stay high-ranked

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existing impact: how we are judged…

BUT…

• JIF is easily gamed:http://bit.ly/1uYDPgE

• And gives inaccurate views ofjournal quality: http://bit.ly/1Ddo8Be

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… hence altmetrics

‘With altmetrics, we can crowdsource peer-review. Instead of waiting months for two opinions, an article’s impact might be assessed by thousands of conversations and bookmarks in a week. In the short term, this is likely to supplement traditional peer-review, perhaps augmenting rapid review in journals like PLoS ONE, BMC Research Notes or BMJ Open. In the future, greater participation and better systems for identifying expert contributors may allow peer review to be performed entirely from altmetrics.

Unlike the JIF, altmetrics reflect the impact of the article itself, not its venue. Unlike citation metrics, altmetrics will track impact outside the academy, impact of influential but uncited work, and impact from sources that aren’t peer-reviewed. Some have suggested altmetrics would be too easy to game; we argue the opposite.’

altmetrics: a manifesto -- http://bit.ly/1tldeJA

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what might altmetrics look like?

Altmetrics: a manifesto – http://bit.ly/1tldeJA

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ANU page – ‘Increasing your research impact’

http://libguides.anu.edu.au/content.php?pid=499217&sid=4105636

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…so crowdsourcing via the Open movement, in data & scholarship, might be the answer?

Eg

• Datacite

• DASH (Harvard)

• Caselaw

• Ravel LawFurther reading:http://bit.ly/1LgPtbo

• ANU Digital Collections

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and there are tools to measure institutions 5

learning more about biblio>alt

Quantifying and Analysing Scholarly Communications on the Web, June ‘15

http://ascw.know-center.tugraz.at/

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http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/hefcemetrics-review/

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The Metric Tide argues for metrics with …

• Robustness: basing metrics on the best possible data in terms of accuracy and scope;

• Humility: recognising that quantitative evaluation should support – but not supplant – qualitative, expert assessment;

• Transparency: keeping data collection and analytical processes open and transparent, so that those being evaluated can test and verify the results;

• Diversity: accounting for variation by field, and using a variety of indicators to support diversity across the research system;

• Reflexivity: recognising systemic and potential effects of indicators and updating them in response.

www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/metrics

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6. Some conclusions

what can bloggers do?

• Acknowledge the ceaseless emergence of technology, and engage with it as widely as our time & energy allows

• Base our practices on community and collaboration: share what we know, learn from each other via blogs

• Be Open in teaching and research: support the Open movement

• Read & engage with the research eg on Impact Blog

• Blog: use new media to shape our research and our narratives of social engagement and impact – before someone else shapes it for us.

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some useful referencesBIALL Legal Information Literacy Statement, http://www.biall.org.uk/data/files/BIALL_Legal_Information_Literacy_Statement_July_2012.pdf

Cheston, C.C., Flickinger, T.E., Chisholm, M.S. (2013). Social media use in medical education: A systematic review, Academic Medicine. 88, 6, 893-901.

Holmes, K. (2014). Going beyond bibliometric and altmetric counts to understand impact. http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/articles/2014-05/going-beyond-bibliometric-and-altmetric-counts-understand-impact#sthash.4stanFFN.dpuf

Jardine, L. (1996). Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. Macmillan, London.

Jones, C. (2013). The digital university: a concept in need of definition. In R. Goodfellow, M.R.Lea, eds, Literacy in the Digital University. Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship and Technology. SRHE, Routledge, London, 162-172.

Jordan, K. (2014). Academics and their online networks: Exploring the role of academic social networking sites. Available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4937/4159

Konkiel, S. (2014) Playing with altmetrics. http://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/altmetrics-services/#more-3175

Maliniak, D., Powers, R., Walter, B.F. (2013). The gender citation gap in International Relations. International Organization, 67, 4, 889-922. http://bit.ly/1yYFxym

SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy (2011). The Core Model.http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf

Veletsianos, G. (2013). Open practices and identity: Evidence from researchers and educators’ social media participation. British Journal of Education Technology, 44, 4, 639-51.

Yang, Kiduk and Meho, Lokman I. Citation Analysis: A Comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science., 2006 . In 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST), Austin (US), 3-8 November 2006. [Conference paper], http://eprints.rclis.org/8605/

Email:paul.maharg@anu.edu.auWeb: paulmaharg.comSlides: paulmaharg.com/slides