About the Book
Academic work, like many other professional occupations, has increasingly become digitised. This book brings together leading scholars who examine the impacts, possibilities, politics and drawbacks of working in the contemporary university, using digital technologies. Contributors take a critical perspective in identifying the implications of digitisation for the future of higher education, academic publishing protocols and platforms and academic employment conditions, the ways in which academics engage in their everyday work and as public scholars and relationships with students and other academics. The book includes accounts of using digital media and technologies as part of academic practice across teaching, research administration and scholarship endeavours, as well as theoretical perspectives. The contributors span the spectrum of early to established career academics and are based in education, research administration, sociology, digital humanities, media and communication.
Table of Contents:
1. The digital academic: identities, contexts and politics 2. Towards an academic self? Blogging during the doctorate 3. Going from PhD to platform 4. Academic persona: the construction of online reputation in the modern academy 5. Academic Twitter and academic capital: collapsing orality and literacy in scholarly publics 6. Intersections online: academics who tweet 7. Sustaining Asian Australian scholarly activism online 8. Digital backgrounds, active foregrounds: student and teacher experiences with ‘flipping the classroom’ 9. A labour of love: a critical examination of the ‘labour icebergs’ of massive open online courses 10. Digital methods and data labs: the redistribution of educational research to education data science 11. Interview 12. Interview
About the Author :
Deborah Lupton is Centenary Research Professor in the News and Media Research Centre, Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is the author/co-author of 16 books, the latest of which are Digital Sociology (Routledge, 2015), The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking (Polity, 2016) and Digital Health: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, in press), and has also edited three further books. Deborah is the co-leader of the Digital Data and Society Consortium. Her blog is This Sociological Life and she tweets as @DALupton.
Inger Mewburn is the Director of Research Training at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, where she is responsible for designing, measuring and evaluating centrally run research training initiatives and doing research on research candidature to improve experience. Inger blogs at www.thesiswhisperer.com.
Pat Thomson PSM is Professor of Education, School of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the author/editor of eighteen books, the most recent being Inspiring School Change: Reforming Education Through the Creative Arts (2017, with Chris Hall, Routledge), Place Based methods for Researching schools (2016, with Chris Hall, Bloomsbury), Educational Leadership and Pierre Bourdieu (2017, Routledge) and Detox Your Writing: Strategies for Doctoral Researchers (with Barbara Kamler, Routledge 2016). She blogs about academic writing and research on patthomson.net and tweets as @ThomsonPat.
Review :
‘If you care about the future of academic work (… and academic workers) then this is a "must read" collection of chapters. These are some of the biggest names in the digital social sciences, and it is wonderful to see their ideas and arguments extended well beyond the usual 140 characters!’
– Neil Selwyn, Professor, Faculty of Education, Monash University
‘The growing use of social media in academia, and the increasing importance of maintaining a digital profile and professional online identity, should be recognised, acknowledged and discussed. The Digital Academic brings together leading participants in the online academic environment, and we see through their analyses how multifaceted, complex and beneficial online experiences, reputation and identities are within the modern higher education context.’
– Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Humanities, Department of Information Studies, University College London
‘Lupton, Mewburn and Thomson have brought together an international team of renowned scholars to think critically about the use of digital media in higher education. The many issues raised in The Digital Academic are not only notable and engaging, but necessary for us all to explore as our institutions become more digitised, more networked and more global. A highly recommended read!’
– George Veletsianos, Professor and Canada Research Chair of Innovative Learning and Technology, School of Education and Technology, Royal Roads University
‘From using Twitter to running MOOCs or writing on open platforms, the modern academic identity is increasingly constructed online. While many books write of the positive or negative possibilities this offers, few offer a balanced, critical perspective of the issues involved. Drawing on a wide range of the leading academics in this field, this book is an invaluable contribution to helping us understand what it means to be an academic in the 21st century.’
– Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology, Learning and Teaching Innovation, The Open University
