Open University Scholarly Networking Report

Download the report (pdf)

About the report:

The Open University has recently released a report on the use of scholarly networking and web 2.0 tools by its faculty, which may be of interest to the Bamboo community. While the Open University is in some ways a special case due to its implementation of distance learning as the primary means of presenting courses, many of the practices documented in the report can be found elsewhere, or could be useful even in the context of a traditional institution.

The report was prepared by Linda Wilks under the direction of Prof. John Wolffe, based on a series of interviews conducted with faculty. Later this year, Linda will be writing a follow-up report after conducting more in-depth interviews designed to elicit, among other things, scholarly narratives that can be added to the Bamboo Scholarly Narrative Repository. Topics covered include:

• What is Scholarly Networking?
• Tools used by the Open University for faculty-student and faculty-colleague networking
• The prevalence and many roles of Facebook, including communication between colleagues, disseminating announcements, collecting feedback from students, and providing a community hub for students who cannot meet in person
• The emergence of Twitter as a supplement to the face-to-face coffee culture among faculty colleagues and as a means of disseminating university information and advertising publicly-available programs
• The use of YouTube and iTunesU as a way of disseminating educational content to the public
• Blogs as a way of promoting courses, books, and receiving feedback from colleagues through comments
• Tools specifically developed by the Open University, including repositories and a Ning-based researchers' network
• Problematic issues related to web 2.0 and Scholarly Networking, including privacy, IP concerns, security, content control, usability, and user take-up of new tools