What does academic influence mean in a world of social media and information abundance?
Both academia and social networks are, in effect, ‘reputational economies’ (Willinsky, 2010) but while scholars and educators are increasingly exhorted to ‘go online,’ those who do often find that their work and efforts may not be visible or understood within institutional contexts. Likewise, as the academic tradition grapples with sea changes in infrastructure and communications, the terms by which scholarship has been defined and legitimized are being unsettled from within.
What are the implications of all this change for the academy’s concepts of knowledge, legitimacy, and influence? Networked practices can create new opportunities for public engagement with ideas (Weller, 2012), but they demand the construction, performance and curation of intelligible public identities as a price of admission. What counts as authenticity in online academic circles? What kinds of influence are created and wielded when scholars utilize social media? And how do scholars make sense of each others’ credibility and work within these spaces?
Bonnie Stewart, of the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, has examined networked scholarly practices on Twitter and in MOOCs for a number of years, and these questions form the backbone of her emerging research into reputation, identity positions, and influence in academic online networks.
View a recording of this talk online.