There are several literacies that scholar-teachers need to develop. One of which speaks more to the scholar side of things is the ability to be able to use social media to find, grow, and facilitate academic relationships. Greenhow & Gleason point out, “[i]ncreasingly, employers in various fields seek employees with social media savvy” (2014, p. 1). This encourages scholar-teachers to not just read online but to be an author of material, to create and maintain an online presence, in the same manner, one would cultivate a physical social presence. With the size of the world shrinking through the interconnectivity of the Internet, the ability to connect with other scholars that share our interests and passions is ours to lose. This literacy is important as collaboration can allow us to gain perspectives that we didn’t previously have access to and on a more practical note, it can lead to less remotely isolated duplication of similar studies to free up time and resources for application or replication of studies for practicality and validity. This is an important social issue for researchers to consider as their community is not just a local one, but a national or even an international one. With this scope of distribution and consumption, the weight and direction of pursuits must be more carefully evaluated.
Another literacy that scholar-teachers need to develop is digital literacy, specifically critical digital literacies. The Rich article claims, “[w]eb readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy” (2008). Being able to know if and how media is manipulating you is an especially important task in today’s age of “fake news”, climate change denial, and anti-vaxers. Rand makes the excellent point that the speed at which you can transverse the web “allows a reader to ‘cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view'” but without proper teacher education of the scholarship surrounding critical digital literacies, a malicious source has the same weight as a beneficial one for both the researcher and the researcher’s classroom. This is an important social and emotional issue as fear-mongering and manipulation can blind us to the hardships of our communities through the guise of stability and ignorance.
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your thoughtful initial post which includes evidence from the readings. I agree with your point that one ‘literacy’ for today’s scholar-teachers to develop is their ability to harness social media to identify, expand, and sustain academic relationships with other scholars. In fact, when scholars who use social media have been surveyed on what they use it for, they have responded that ‘finding collaborators’ and ‘keeping up with research trends’ were two of their reasons (*I need to find this cite).
I have one clarifying question on this part of your response. You wrote, “With the size of the world shrinking through the interconnectivity of the Internet, the ability to connect with other scholars that share our interests and passions is ours to lose.” What do you mean “is ours to lose?” What is ours to lose?
Also, I am wondering what cognitive, social or emotional issue(s) your first paragraph raises for educational researchers to consider? For instance, you argue that scholar-teachers should develop the literacy(s) to “not just read online but to be an author of material, to create and maintain an online presence, in the same manner, one would cultivate a physical social presence.”
What cognitive, social or emotional issue(s) are brought to the foreground when you think about studying scholar-teachers’ creation and maintenance of an online presence and offline presence (e.g., what would a research question be)? For instance, I wonder if creating and maintaining an online scholarly presence is really “in the same manner” as creating an offline presence or if there are some interesting differences as well as similarities to explore and perhaps new (and old) literacies to develop? Can you connect at least ONE of these issues back to the readings for this week? You may bring in other readings from EPET as needed.
OR
What cognitive, social or emotional issue(s) are brought to the foreground when you think about studying scholar-teachers’ reading-and-authoring on social media (e.g., what would a research question be)? Can you connect at least ONE of these issues back to the readings?
OR
Can you say a bit more about the “social and emotional issue” to which you refer in the second paragraph of your post? What exactly is the social and/or emotion issue here that educational researchers would want to investigate (e.g., what would a research question be)? Can you connect at least ONE of these issues back to the readings?
Hey Matt,
I like the point you made in your second paragraph about the importance digital literacies, specifically, that fostering the ability of students to critically examine a variety of multimedia sources and evaluate the validity of their claims is a major concern for teacher-scholars. I think As an extension to Chris’ question about what social and emotional issues might be important to investigate in regards to critically examining the validity of sources, I think that cognitive issues might also be interesting to address in this context. You touch on this when you mention Rand’s point about covering more ground when learning about a topic on the web compared with traditional texts; however, I sometimes wonder how beneficial such learning is. What research do you think might be beneficial for researchers to pursue to understand the possible differences in cognitive structures which might result from these different styles of learning?
Hey Chris,
By “ours to lose” I meant that we have ample opportunities to be able to connect through and with social media. So ample that it almost has to be an active effort to not participate, leaving the situation as ours to lose.
I saw teacher-scholars as having a social issue when it came to using social media as the creation of content and being active is as much social in the internet age as being present offline.
In the Greenhow piece, the connection between a community and a teacher-scholar must “serve the interests of the larger community through a dynamic interaction between theory and practice.” The simplest and most effective distribution of information that can serve these interests can come from the existing infrastructure of the internet in general and social media specifically. The teacher-scholar is thus connected to the community through the creation and authorship of the distribution of their expertise in their field and their distillation of this material to their community in a digestible way. This means that not only the creation of media is important but the updating and maintenance of the media is vital to keep a solid connection to a teacher-scholar’s community.
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