Debating Digital Scholarship

I’ve just finished my public debate with Martin Weller on Digital Scholarship. The motion was as follows:

“This house believes that, in the next decade, digital scholarship (in open journals, blogs, and social media) will achieve the same status in academic settings as traditional scholarship.”

Martin argued for the motion and I argued against it. There was certainly a fair amount of playing devil’s advocate here as I’m obviously personally invested in the proliferation of digital technologies in educational contexts, but I really didn’t think that the motion was clear enough to be passed.

I simply don’t know as much as Martin about this – after all, he’s the prof. and this is his research specialisation – so my strategy was just to criticise the coherence and plausibility of the motion. You can see my presentation here.

Digital Scholarship on Prezi

Doug Clow has very helpfully live-blogged the presentations and the ensuing discussion.

In any case, I ‘won’ the (straw poll) vote after the debate by a margin of one! Although the online poll is still open at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SPVTQ7K if you want to make your feelings known…

At the time of writing, this is the state of play…

Provisional Results @ 16.45pm

You can follow the discussion on Twitter through #digschol

<div class=”prezi-player”><style type=”text/css” media=”screen”>.prezi-player { width: 550px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }</style><div class=”prezi-player-links”><p><a title=”The Case Against” href=”http://prezi.com/c1zqo-zwkxfh/digital-scholarship/”>Digital Scholarship</a> on <a href=”http://prezi.com”>Prezi</a></p></div></div&gt;