I just caught wind of a very interesting looking presentation taking place 3pm GMT today at the London School of Economics by Bonnie Stewart. Stewart will be discussing “the intersection of Twitter and higher education, and how ‘academic Twitter’ cultivates scholarly identities and forms of expression that differ from conventional institutional practices.” I have pasted the full description below.

Those of you who can’t make it (I’m assuming this is most of you!) can watch the presentation live streamed (and hopefully later available at the same YouTube page).

Academic Twitter: The Intersection of Orality & Literacy in Scholarship? presented by Bonnie Stewart.

This presentation examines the intersection of Twitter and higher education, and how “academic Twitter” cultivates scholarly identities and forms of expression that differ from conventional institutional practices.

Based in a study using ethnographic methods and examining the practices and perspectives of a collection of globally-located scholars from across a range of academic status positions, the presentation explores the practices by which reputation and influence are cultivated on Twitter.

In open networks like Twitter, signals of scholarly reputation and influence are minimally codified, yet the influence scholars accrue intersects with institutional academia in grant-required measures of “public impact,” in media visibility, and in keynote and job opportunities.

The presentation outlines how both oral and literate traditions of communications (Ong, 1982) contribute to open, networked scholarly engagement on Twitter, and how these collapsed traditions trouble the terms of rank and bibliometric indexing which dominate the conventional concept of academic influence.

The presentation also lays out the operations of influence and reputation in this collapsed communications space, and theorizes its implications for scholarly engagement and higher education.
Finally, the presentation explores the complex logics of influence that networked scholars employ to assess the networked profiles and behaviours of peers and unknown entities, and suggests that the impression of capacity for meaningful contribution – key to cultivating influence and the regard of actively networked peers – may stem from successful navigation of the oral/literate collapse.

The substantive goal of the presentation is to offer a portrait of open, network scholarly influence and the practices that cultivate it, and to consider how the intersection of orality and literacy make academic Twitter a particularly fraught but beneficial place for engaged open scholars and educators.

As always the event is free to attend and places can be reserved via Eventbrite. All our talks are live streamed and recorded for those who can’t attend in person.