Here’s a great, insightful post on the definition and boundaries of scholarship in the Digital Age that both Anne Geller and I have already tweeted this snowy morning.. To summarize: scholarship has three features: it’s public, evaluated, and used to develop further work. Worth reading and thinking about!
Here’s a very short bit of the opening —
When does service become scholarship?
When does anything—service, teaching, editing, mentoring, coding—become scholarship?
My answer is simply this: a creative or intellectual act becomes scholarship when it is public and circulates in a community of peers that evaluates and builds upon it.
I love this post. Thank you for sharing it! Mark Sample’s blog is a personal favorite, as he always has something inspiring to say about the future of scholarship and ideas. This actually brought to mind an idea I have had recently about something the St. Johns English community might do, which is to create a sort of twitter bullpen of grad students and faculty who would be interested in being available to one another for small classroom-based twitter events. I think often of giving undergraduates the experience of having their thoughts about readings and class discussions enter the realm of the public, to have their comments enter the public ” circulating in a community that not only evaluates it but also builds upon it,” as Sample writes. I think this kind of mentorship would benefit not just the undergraduates but the twitter-based mentors as well who like to think about this public style for teaching and knowledge-building, and need more experience with it. We can begin to let students know that there is a new kind of intellectual model developing, one that they will encounter in ever-developing stages as they move through college.