Networked Participatory Scholarship
Open education practices facilitated through engagement with social media can be regarded as a form of networked participatory scholarship.
Networked participatory scholarship (NSP) was defined by George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons in 2011 as
“participation in online social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and otherwise develop their scholarship.”
~ Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent techno-cultural pressures toward open and digital scholarship in online networks, George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons.
NPS was identified as a new form of scholarly practice that developed as scholars increasingly engaged with new social media networks and platforms, in particular twitter and blogging. Veletsianos and Royce characterize NPS as emerging from both digital scholarship and open scholarship practices such as
“teaching and research practices that espouse openness including activities such as open teaching, the production and dissemination of open educational resources, publishing in open access journals, keeping a professional blog, and sharing of research data in online venues.”
~ Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship, George Veletsianos and Royce Kimmons.
A considerable body of scholarly research now exists exploring the affordances and benefits of networked participatory scholarship, while at the same time critiquing the assumptions, challenges and inequalities that NSP embodies, particularly around digital identities, social, digital and information literacies, personal data, and the structural inequalities encoded by technology.
“…networked scholarship may enact Boyer’s initial aim of broadening scholarship itself through fostering extensive cross-disciplinary, public ties and rewarding connection, collaboration, and curation between individuals rather than roles or institutions.”
~ In Abundance: Networked Participatory Practices as Scholarship, Bonnie Stewart.
Further Reading
- Cronin, C., (2016), Initial thoughts… Exploring OEP in higher education, Catherine Cronin Blog.
- Stewart, B. E. (2015). In abundance: Networked participatory practices as scholarship. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16(3).
- Veletsianos, G. (2022). Public & networked scholarship and its challenges. George Veletsianos, PhD Blog
- Veletsianos, G., & Kimmons, R. (2012). Assumptions and challenges of open scholarship. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(4), 166-189.
- Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (2012). Networked Participatory Scholarship: Emergent Techno-Cultural Pressures Toward Open and Digital Scholarship in Online Networks. Computers & Education, 58(2), 766-774.
Webinars
- Openness and Prestige, Catherine Cronin and Bonnie Stewart, Teaching Complexity.
- Networked Scholars Expert Chat with Laura Czerniewicz.
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[Featured Image: –open–, Jeremy Brooks, CC BY-NC, flickr]
Created by Lorna M. Campbell at The University of Edinburgh, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.