Paul Webb, Book Review: Being a Scholar in the Digital Era: Transforming Scholarly Practice for the Public Good by Jessie Daniels and Polly Thistlethwaite

Paul Webb, Book Review: Being a Scholar in the Digital Era: Transforming Scholarly Practice for the Public Good by Jessie Daniels and Polly Thistlethwaite

The New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, has described professors as ‘some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world’ who nonetheless, in the majority of cases, ‘just don’t matter in today’s great debates’. Provocative? Perhaps. Anti-intellectual? I don’t believe so; although one could perhaps more charitably argue that some academics may have inadvertently marginalised themselves, either because they don’t know enough about alternative modes of digital media – podcasts, blogs, twitter, altmetrics and so forth – or because they reject these modes of communication due to the association between digital technology and the marketisation of higher education.

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