SPECIAL ISSUE ALERT: SHOULD ACADEMICS BE “DIGITALLY” ENGAGED?
A new special issue of the online journal Critical Questions in Education (CQIE) entitled The Digitally Connected Academic: Public Scholarship and Activism in the Era of the Internet is dedicated to engaging with questions about what types—and to what extent—professors and instructors should engage in public scholarship across digital platforms.
Academics are certainly rewarded for focusing their time and energy on publishing their work in peer-reviewed journals and writing books. However, research on peer review has found that one-third of of social science and more than 80% of humanities articles are never cited (Remler, 2014) Furthermore, while the number of academic books rose by 45%, from 43,000 to 63,000 between 2005 and 2014, the average sales per title fell from 100 to 60 (Jubb, 2017). Considering that readership and citations are a proxies for impact, should academics evolve the normative conceptions of scholarship to focus additional attention on creating ancillary work derived from their published research to engage in the public? While engagement in evolving communication technologies (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube, etc.) can serve as mechanisms by which traffic is di- rected towards academic journals and books, should faculty also view these platforms as neglected spaces where discourse often lacks empirical expertise? How much, how often, and to what ends should public scholarship take advantage of digital platforms?
The rise of new forms of technological communication platforms to engage in dialogue have provided ample space for individuals and organizations to promote public discourse about education issues (Ravitch, Vasquez Heilig, & Brewer, in press). For example, market-oriented privatization reforms have expertly leveraged the power of social media to amplify their calls for shifting control of P-20 into the hands of privatizers and profiteers. New communication technologies have provided a space where myths of “failed schools” and “bad teachers” continue to thrive in cyberspace as they often go unchallenged by academics and others with expertise on the subject (Malin & Lubienski, 2015). In fact, the unchallenged voices of pro-reform groups on social media platforms have afforded those groups the opportunity to create echo chambers of commonsensical rhetoric about the need to reform schools (Brewer & Wallis, 2015).
Considering the potential evolution of the field and ongoing public discourse about con- temporary education such as education reform on various technological platforms, the aim of this special issue was to begin—and continue for CONTINUE READING: Special Issue Alert: Should Academics be “Digitally” Engaged? | Cloaking Inequity
