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Digital Scholarship in an Analog World



Digital Scholarship in an Analog World

Gary L. Beck Dallaghan, PhD
Assistant Dean, Evaluation & Assessment
Professor, Medical Education 
University of Texas at Tyler School of Medicine

 

Over the past 20 years we have seen an increase in the digitalization of multimedia products. Health science education courses can now be delivered online, either asynchronously or in real time. People listen to podcasts, read blogs, or watch videos for any number of reasons. Health science educators are taking advantage of this move to the digital world as well—many of the journals are strictly online. Where does educational scholarship fit into this mix?

In 1990, Boyer redefined scholarship. He categorized scholarship as discovery, integration, application and teaching (Boyer, 1996). About 10 years later, Shulman and Hutchings noted that in order for someone’s work to be considered scholarship, it needed to be public, available for peer review or critique according to standards of the field, and able to be reproduced or extended by other scholars (Hutchings & Shulman, 1999). In 2000, Glassick developed criteria for evaluating scholarship. These criteria included having clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, reflective critique, and effective presentation (Glassick, 2000).

The earlier definitions of digital scholarship centered on what was able to be accomplished with technology at the time, which was the digitalization of physical documents. These early projects simply replicated archives, built tools, and/or offered proof of concept models (think open access journals).  They were all simply digital versions of their analog selves. With advances, there are so many venues to produce scholarship and unique methods of evaluating the impact and reach of the data.

Criteria for scholarship are still relevant and essential. The questions at hand relate to the mechanisms of dissemination of work and effective presentation. Alternative metrics can be employed to study the impact of works that are produced for blogs, wikis, podcasts, social media, etc. (ALiEM, n.d.; Colmers-Gray et al., 2019; Johng et al., 2021; Lin et al., 2023).

One method of analysis we employed for a Twitter chat on medical education topics is social network analysis (Bokhove, 2018). Three basic components of social network analysis include nodes (i.e., participants), edges (i.e., relationships between nodes), and directions (i.e., who initiated communication and who received it). Social diagrams for each discussion were generated to visually depict the social interactions among participants in the Twitter-based platform. Additionally, social network parameters were generated indicating the interactivity of the network, including density, cohesion, and centralities. This enabled us to study the network members’ connections among themselves.

From our study, we found that contributions to understanding a Twitter-based professional learning community identified only a few active participants generating content while the majority shared tweets. Of the active participants, most common functions included referring to others’ messages, continuing the discussion, or sharing resources. This work is currently submitted to a journal for publication (Zheng et al., 2023).

In summary, digital scholarship has the potential to push the boundaries of our traditional views of scholarship, particularly where dissemination and effective presentation is concerned. At no time should we sacrifice the criteria laid out by Glassick (2000) as a standard for rigor in our scholarly pursuits.

References

  1. Academic Life in Emergency Medicine Approved Instructional Resources (ALiEM). Available at https://www.aliem.com/aliem-approved-instructional-resources-air-series/. Accessed 3 July 2023.
  2. Bokhove C. Exploring classroom interaction with dynamic social network analysis. Int J Res Method Educ 2018; 41(1):17-37.
  3. Boyer EL. From scholarship reconsidered to scholarship assessed. Quest 1996; 48(2):129-139.
  4. Colmers-Gray IN, Krishnan K, Chan TM, Seth Trueger N, Paddock M, Grock A, Zaver F, Thoma B. The Revised METRIQ Score: A quality evaluation tool for online educational resources. AEM Educ Train 2019; 3(4):387-392.
  5. Glassick CE. (2000). Boyer's expanded definitions of scholarship, the standards for assessing scholarship, and the elusiveness of the scholarship of teaching. Acad Med 2000; 75(9):877-880.
  6. Hutchings P; Shulman LS. The scholarship of teaching: New elaborations, new developments. Change 1999; 31(5):10–15.
  7. Johng SY, Mishori R, Korostyshevskiy VR. Social media, digital scholarship, and academic promotion in US medical schools. Fam Med 2021; 53(3):215-219.
  8. Lin M, Phipps M, Chan TM, Thoma B, Nash CJ, Yilmaz Y, Chen D, He S, Gisondi MA. Digital impact Factor: A quality index for educational blogs and podcasts in Emergency Medicine and Critical Care. Ann Emerg Med 2023; 82(1):55-65.
  9. Zheng B, Beck Dallaghan G, Wang Z. Exploring social dynamics and discourse moves in a Twitter-facilitated synchronous discussion. Submitted, 2023.