Thoughts on Publishing and on Being an Academic

It's the end of the year, and I'm growing reflective. I'm thinking back over the past year, the things I've done, and the things I've left undone. I deliberately didn't set a lot of goals for this year (in my first post of this year I talked some about that), but informally, I figured I would do some writing, and try to publish a few things. I've become an academic...and that's a big part of what academics do, after all.

One of my proudest accomplishments--academically speaking--of the past academic year was getting an article I co-wrote with two of my professional colleagues and friends published in a highly regarded EdTech journal. Our piece is entitled "Assessing Digital Nativeness in Pre-Service Teachers: Analysis of the Digital Natives Assessment Scale and Implications for Practice," and we got it published in the Journal of Research on Technology in Education, which is a top-10 journal in the EdTech field (depending on the way the question is asked, anyway. I'm basing it on the research included in the chapter "Where Should Educational Technologists Publish Their Research?") Matt and Jake and I have been researching different aspects of the so-called "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" for several years, and have presented some of our research together at conferences, and now have published this piece. It was a lot of work, but gratifying to see our research in print. 

But I recently read this piece from John Hwang entitled "Christian Scholars have a Distribution Problem," and boy did this resonate with me. Hwang's basic argument is that academics are doing great work...but very few people wind up reading/viewing the work because it's often (primarily) done for others within our specific guilds. And this connected with me...because who is really going to read the article Matt and Jake and I published? Honest answer: probably only a handful of other EdTech researchers who are also interested in the digital natives/digital immigrants "construct," and the problems associated with the abject lack of empirical evidence for it.

In fact, I can check how many people have cited our work on Google Scholar...and after a year out in the world, it has been cited by...wait for it...ONE person so far. I hope that a few others have actually read the piece, but I don't really know if they have. And if they have read it, have they found it beneficial in any substantive way?

On the other hand, I write things here on the blog--infrequently as they come--and I regularly have 100+ people read the posts I'm putting out in this format. My most read posts have had 10,000+ reads, though there are precious few in that category; only 3 or 4 over the decade I've been writing on here. But I've had 440,000 views of things I've written on this little ol' blog in that decade, and that feels like something substantial. In contrast, I've had a total of 38 citations of things I've published formally as journal articles, book reviews, and chapters in edited books in that same 10 year period. While I'm quite sure I've had more than 38 people read those pieces that have gone through peer review...it's still a striking difference.

The numbers don't tell the whole story, of course. Certainly there is a difference in these two forms of writing, and the informality of publishing my thoughts-in-process on the blog is WILDLY DIFFERENT than the rigorously peer-reviewed approach to getting an article published in JRTE. Not to mention that I don't typically use my thickest educationese and academic writing style here--it's much more informal writing, and much more of "here's what I'm thinking about in the 30 minutes I had to write this thing" rather than the careful, painstaking, thoroughly-sourced writing in a journal.

But I do wonder about whether the things I write here on the blog have more practical value for the readers than the more academic writing I also do. Is this going to be more likely to spur a conversation between practicing educators than a journal article? I wonder about this, and it makes me think I should keep writing things and pushing my first-draft thinking here.

Or take podcasting as another experiment in informal publishing. Along with my Education department buddies, Abby and Matt, we started recording Hallway Conversations about a year ago. In that time, we have had just about 11,000 downloads over 44 episodes. This means we are averaging about 250 listens to each episode--which is a modest audience by some measures, but I'm incredibly grateful for the dedicated community of regular listeners we've developed over time. We get feedback, questions, and affirmations regularly from our listeners, and this gives us a fair confidence that what we are putting out into the world each week is fostering valuable reflection and discussion, at least for a small number of educators. 

Is there value in traditional, peer-reviewed academic publishing? Certainly. And I'm grateful that I get to do this, and that people have read and cited my work--this is affirmation that it is valued, at least by people in my weird little guild of EdTech researchers.

But is there also value in non-traditional, more informal publishing venues? I think so. And, when push comes to shove...are these going to be more impactful for practice for educators than peer-reviewed articles that are likely to end up behind a paywall or in an academic library on a university campus? I'm thinking that this is likely the case.

The real problem for me is time. I have lots of ideas of things I'd like to research and write about. I'm most limited by the amount of time I have to dedicate to this work that I find so enjoyable! So this prompts the question for me: where should I devote my limited time? Peer-reviewed writing for my guild that is more reputable and reliable, but less likely to be accessed? Or informally-published work that has less prestige, but might have more widespread impact? 

Regardless of the answer to this question, I hope I'll keep doing both for the foreseeable future. And I know I've got a couple of books in me too...it's just a matter of finding the time to start writing them!

Image by Mohammed Hassan via Pixabay