Materials from this webinar are now available from the ALT Repository.

Traditionally, university faculties have exercised economic and organisational autonomy over the activities of scholarship, believing themselves to be the guardians of a social consensus on the value and role of scholarship as a 'public good'. But, in the contemporary context of national education policies that construct the public good of the university in terms of economic value - of its research, and of the skills, qualifications and career opportunities offered to students and future employers - a new discourse of 'open-ness' is threatening the traditional scholarly values of critical reflection, methodological rigour, and the expert search for truth.

Digital communication and the internet bring competing sets of values, including immediacy, serendipity, the mutability of knowledge, and the participation of crowds. How can the traditions of scholarship, the principle of open-ness, and the new cultures of digitality be combined? Is such a triangle even possible?

In this session Robin Goodfellow will take a critical look at some contexts of practice in which scholarship, digitality, and openness interact, and explore the inherent tension between practices that aim to deepen the understanding of specialist communities, and those that aim to open up the social construction of scholarship to universal participation. He will discuss implications for the relationship between scholarship and teaching in the digital university, and look at some recent work on literacy and knowledge practices in digital higher education which points to a way out of the apparent contradictions.

About the presenter

Robin Goodfellow is Senior Lecturer in Teaching with New Technologies at the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology. He was principle investigator for the ESRC-funded seminar series Literacy in the Digital University between 2009 and 2011 and is a contributing co-editor of 'Literacy in the Digital University - Critical Perspectives on Learning, Scholarship and Technology' (Routledge 2013). He is also co-author of Challenging E-Learning in the University - a literacies perspective (McGraw Hill/Open University Press 2007).

About the series

This seminar series is funded by the JISC IOE Digital Literacy project, and will be hosted by ALT. It will explore the themes of the forthcoming special issue of Research in Learning Technology, which will focus on Digital Literacies and Digital Scholarship. The authors of four of the papers in the special issue will present on their research and theoretical perspectives surrounding these themes.  The series will be curated by Lesley Gourlay (joint editor of RLT) and Special Issue guest editors Martin Oliver and Norm Friesen. Sessions will involve presentation, exploration of themes by the facilitators and open discussion with participants.

The webinar will be run using Blackboard Collaborate 11. We will notify you of arrangements approximately three days prior to the webinar, giving you time to get your PC or Mac set up and tested, taking account of the guidance on the ALT web site at http://www.alt.ac.uk/events/webinar-faqs.