Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work: The Case of English Studies

Conclusion: The Future of Digital Media and/in English Studies—Models of Practice

179 Conclusion: The Future of Digital Media and/in English Studies—Models of Practice Peer review and other academic processes, such as promotion and tenure reviews, increasingly do not reflect the ways scholarship actually is conducted. In a climate in which the established methods of peer review are grounded in print-based publications , acknowledging and verifying scholarly contributions in unusual formats can be quite difficult. Where standards are not clearly defined, it is a challenge indeed to estimate the academic significance of digital works. This affects tenure, promotion, selection of new faculty, and other academic processes, as well. —Horizon Report The 2006 Horizon Report, a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, was published the same year as the “Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion.” It “describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education” (3). In addition to describing the technological trends that will affect colleges and universities (for example, social computing and personal broadcasting ), the report also “for the first time this year . . . explicitly identified and considered many challenges facing higher education” over the next five years (4). The report presents five challenges listed in “rank order,” the first of which is peer review and other academic processes. Other challenges include pedagogical issues (for example, teaching information literacy) and problems that are not specific to the academy but affect academic discourse (for example, intellectual property concerns) (4). CONCLUSION 180 The report does not specifically describe how the emerging technologies listed might impact peer review and other academic processes but instead focuses on their “relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression,” speculating about the potential applications of each technology in the classroom and in research/scholarship. The fact that the report does not consider the specific impact on promotion and tenure or hiring processes is not surprising because those academic processes are so dependent, as the preceding chapters have demonstrated, upon local context. Furthermore, as the preceding chapters have argued, those processes are complicated by individuals’ departmental and disciplinary locations, identifications, and affiliations. In addition to professional identifications and affiliations, part of the difficulty affecting the evaluation of digital media work is finding models of what that work looks like and how that work could be evaluated. As the Horizon Report notes, standards are often not clearly defined; however, it is difficult to define new standards in the absence of a test case. It is these two questions—What might new models of scholarship look like? Who is doing such work now?—that can help the discipline understand the implications for revising tenure and promotion policy, training teachers to use digital media in their classes, and generally supporting all kinds of digital media work in a variety of fields. Through a series of case studies, this book has sought to describe some of the work that is being done and what some new models of scholarship and teaching might look like. Furthermore, digital media have revealed some of the ways that scholarship, teaching, and service overlap, bringing into full relief the issues that Ernest Boyer raised in 1997 about the narrow and inflexible definition of scholarship and the problem of evaluating a range of intellectual work (work that is often not easily categorized under current tenure and promotion paradigms). Toby’s website for training professional writing TAs is a great example of a “problematic” project, problematic not primarily because it involves digital media production but because it crosses the categories of “teaching” and “service” (at least as the print-centric department defines those categories). However, it also fits into Boyer’s categories of the scholarship of integration and the scholarship of teaching. Under the print-centric department’s definition of scholarship (which most closely resembles Boyer’s category of the scholarship of discovery), though, it simply does not fit. Boyer further asserts that higher education is stuck in a rhetorical battle between the “competing goals” of teaching and research and argues that our restricted view of the nature of scholarship needs to THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL MEDIA 181 be broadened, helping us to break out of the teaching versus research debate and view scholarship as composed of a variety of functions and activities. Digital media scholars are also...