Whose lives could be made better by access to your expertise? How might your research inform public policy or enhance community development? How can you create direct connections to individuals and groups who would benefit most from your work?
Social media tools have transformed the way the world receives, talks about and creates information. With them come new opportunities to connect to audiences that were previously inaccessible to academic thinkers and writers. Blogs, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social outlets put researchers, scholars and even students into direct contact with a broader range of audiences. Among them are:
- Interdisciplinary scholarly communities built around common interests and goals
- Practitioner and industry audiences
- International organizations
- Journals, publications and mass media outlets
- Public policymakers and advocacy organizations
- Authors and newsmakers
Engaging new audiences also introduces new questions about the nature, potential and challenges of public scholarship. For individual researchers come questions about the capacity to translate, share and interact in new environments. For the institution comes questions about freedom — academic and otherwise — and the capacity needed to support faculty who choose to expand their reach.
As numerous institutional stakeholders delve into this conversation, there are a number of perspectives and questions they must reflect on.
Academics: Why Commit to Public Scholarship?
The first step is to determine whether committing to a more public form of scholarship is worthwhile. Here are a few questions to help the individual faculty member make an informed decision:
- With whom do I really want to engage, and for what purpose?
- What do I have to share with those audiences? How might that enhance or change their lives, their work or their communities? What could they do differently with the knowledge I am able to share?
- Where do those target audiences interact? What are their routine sources of information?
- Does my work appeal to mass media and their wider audiences? Does my research address real-world problems, questions and issues? What can I contribute to the conversation and the knowledge base?
- Am I prepared to engage in authentic ways with these new audiences?
- Am I prepared to not only learn how to use new tools for sharing information but invest the necessary time to interact with readers/listeners/viewers once I’m there?
- Am I prepared to create new content, based on my research, to meet the learning and information needs of these new audiences? Am I willing to make what I have to share accessible and useful?
Institutions: Is Public Scholarship Worthwhile?
Academic institutions also have questions to consider as researchers and units commit to public scholarship. Among them:
- Are there boundaries to what is acceptable — and non-acceptable — faculty engagement? Do those boundaries balance institutional needs with individual academic freedom? How do we involve the campus community in defining those boundaries, and can we communicate those parameters clearly once they are defined?
- As an institution, are we active in new media environments? Do we do more than issue our standard news releases on those platforms?
- Can we amplify the process for faculty scholars and even create opportunities to share their work with new audiences?
- Do we have the internal expertise to support faculty and staff who want to leverage new tools to expand their reach? Does that support include not only the technology training, but strategic thinking and planning for greatest impact?
Conclusion
Individual scholars need clarity about what they have to share with wider public audiences, and honesty about whether they have the interest and the commitment to create versions of their work that are useful to lay audiences — and to engage with those audiences in new settings.
Institutions must recognize that how adults access information and interact has been forever changed and that they must adapt to remain relevant. They also must understand that faculty need more than their blessing; they need access to support and other resources to be effective researchers.
For a quick-start overview of the issues and opportunities, please visit my Pinterest board.
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