From a talk in EDUCAUSE 2010:
The University of Minnesota Duluth chancellor appointed a committee in 2008 to develop “a campus-wide statement in terms of the acceptability of technology and web-based research and scholarship within the promotion and tenure process.
Among the committee’s findings:
- Newer forms of scholarship are emerging, often driven by technology tools. Scholarly web sites, blogs, software tools, electronic portfolios, video documentaries, and other newer forms may be considered as evidence of scholarly work at some institutions.
- Some institutions accept that emerging forms of scholarship should count toward promotion and tenure. At the same time, few, if any, seem to have devised workable systems or metrics for documenting and evaluating such forms of scholarship.
Among its recommendations:
- […] departments […] may want to consider whether to include the broader areas of scholarship (research and creative work) as defined by Boyer (1990). In this book Boyer (1990) identifies four categories of scholarship […]:
- the scholarship of discovery
- the scholarship of integration
- the scholarship of application
- the scholarship of teaching
- Faculty who wish to expand into newer forms of scholarship should plan in advance how to document the value of the work and recognize that some form of review by experts in the discipline must be included in the presentation of the work in a tenure or promotion document.
[ht: Digital and Scholarly via Shimon Schocken]
On the one hand, you get credit for blogging, wikipedia-editing and the like, but on the other hand, you impose external assessment on those activities (which is a burden for the assessors as well as for the assessed). Perhaps it’s best if this continues to be done completely informally – at least I hope some of this activity will continue to exist without any formal assessment.
Often is is quite clear though methods to documenting it are needed, but evaluation metrics should not be too dependent upon.
This blogs adds a lot of value. At least I get a lot out of it, both in terms of learning and as well as in terms of expressing ideas (in culturally a less informal and more frank way).
To measure the impact of this blog by the number of posts, or comments, or even readership is not that meaningful. These metrics might miss evaluating the depth fully, which in some cases is a better metric of specialization.
It is like evaluating the impact of scientists by bean counting.
Thanks for your useful post. I am always looking for news like this that gives me a full understanding of the subject. Keep up the good work.