Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Academic Publishing and Relevance

Since finishing my PhD I’ve applied for five different tenure-track faculty positions. I’ve been invited to interview for just one of those. I may apply for another position sometime down the road, but I’m currently very happy teaching 4th & 5th graders as a STEM teacher, occasionally teaching teachers as an educational consultant/speaker, and regularly teaching in-service teachers about multimedia technology integration via Montana CSPD and the University of Montana. I’m also very thankful to be an educational author, and am working on my fourth book which will be published this summer.

The realities of academic publishing, as they exist today, are NOT a motivator for me to join the ranks of full-time college professors. In her post, “What’s the Point of Academic Publishing?,” Sarah Kendzior summarizes these circumstances well:

Academic publishing is no guarantee of anything, except possibly the paywalled obsolescence of your work.

I’m interested in helping redefine what it means to be a “literate learner” inside and outside the classroom today. I have zero desire to publish in paywalled journals a very limited number of people are ever likely to read. I’m interested in supporting open educational research and publishing. As I heard Clay Shirky observe at EduCause in 2012, the traditional purposes of scientific journals were to increase the speed of access and breadth of access of information to others. Currently, most academic journals serve opposite purposes.

Give Sarah’s recent post a read. It echoes and reinforces many of my own thoughts about the desirability and relevance of “academic publishing.”

Mobile blogged on my iPhone5 with WordPress for iOS.

If you enjoyed this post and found it useful, subscribe to Wes’ free newsletter. Check out Wes’ video tutorial library, “Playing with Media.” Information about more ways to learn with Dr. Wesley Fryer are available on wesfryer.com/after.

On this day..


Posted

in

, , ,

by

Tags:

Comments

One response to “Academic Publishing and Relevance”

  1. […] sitting down and reading a great blog post by Dr. Wesley Fryer, I realized something. Even though the article is on publishing in education journals, something […]