Jisc Digital Literacy Webinar: Scholarly, Digital, Open: An Impossible Triangle? Presented by Robin Goodfellow

This seminar series is funded by the JISC IOE Digital Literacy project, and will be hosted by ALT. It will explore the themes of the forthcoming special issue of Research in Learning Technology, which will focus on Digital Literacies and Digital Scholarship. The authors of four of the papers in the special issue will present on their research and theoretical perspectives surrounding these themes. The series will be curated by Lesley Gourlay (joint editor of RLT) and Special Issue guest editors Martin Oliver and Norm Friesen. Sessions will involve presentation, exploration of themes by the facilitators and open discussion with participants.Traditionally, university faculties have exercised economic and organisational autonomy over the activities of scholarship, believing themselves to be the guardians of a social consensus on the value and role of scholarship as a 'public good'. But, in the contemporary context of national education policies that construct the public good of the university in terms of economic value - of its research, and of the skills, qualifications and career opportunities offered to students and future employers - a new discourse of 'open-ness' is threatening the traditional scholarly values of critical reflection, methodological rigour, and the expert search for truth.Digital communication and the internet bring competing sets of values, including immediacy, serendipity, the mutability of knowledge, and the participation of crowds. How can the traditions of scholarship, the principle of open-ness, and the new cultures of digitality be combined? Is such a triangle even possible?In this session Robin Goodfellow will take a critical look at some contexts of practice in which scholarship, digitality, and openness interact, and explore the inherent tension between practices that aim to deepen the understanding of specialist communities, and those that aim to open up the social construction of scholarship to universal participation. He will discuss implications for the relationship between scholarship and teaching in the digital university, and look at some recent work on literacy and knowledge practices in digital higher education which points to a way out of the apparent contradictions.