Day 3 AECT 2012: Part 1 - Sharing Your Work as an Academic

This post is part of a Multiple Part Series on the 2012 AECT Convention.

#AECT 2012

Impacts and Dissemination of Scholarship
The first presentation I attended was given by Patrick Lowenthal, who presented on how to effectively share knowledge in higher education. I found that he provided some very powerful methods for sharing knowledge and getting scholarly work out there. Here is a summary of what he presented (not a comprehensive summary, but several of the main points). This, in my opinion, should be viewed as an additional set of strategies that supplement the traditional (and still important) methods of publishing, presenting, and teaching.

Put your stuff online! This is the basic habit - get your work out there to spread what you are doing to the rest of the world.
Track how people are using your work. Set up Google Alerts for your writing topics, your paper titles, your own name, etc. This will help you discover how people find you so that you can more effectively share your work in the future.
Publish some in open access journals. This get your name out there more because the work is openly available. Some open access journals even allow you to see how many people are looking at your work.
Share your work using social media. Some site include the following:

• Academia.edu
• Mendeley.com

 Pick a social network or two to share your work on. This helps push your content and you work to others and gets your name out there even more. I personally use LinkedIn and Twitter. I also share on Google + whenever I have something new I have written.

Share pre-publication drafts of your work. This helps get your work out there and helps you to connect more with the people that are doing work in your area. (I've done this on my blog for some of my articles, for example this one).

Review work of other people. This helps build the community and helps you to build a network with others who are doing similar work. You could easily do book reviews on Amazon.com.

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Again, this is a non-comprehensive summary of the presentation, but the ideas are powerful and really help to promote scholarly work in meaningful, interesting ways. Great presentation.