Writing at the Library

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently taking a sabbatical from my work at Franklin University for the summer trimester. For the first month (May), I have been focusing my efforts on writing a coupe of journal articles. I thought I would share a little about what that has been like.

I have been spending my time at the Grove City Library in downtown Grove City. It's a relatively quiet place, and I can usually get a lot of work done. This is pretty exciting work, my friends - writing scholarly articles! To give you an idea of the excitement, here is what it looks like when I am writing:

What it looks like when I am writing scholarly articles. Usually there are two hands, but one of them is taking the picture.

Sometimes I feel like I need to take a break and look up. When I do, this is what it looks like:

What it looks like when I look up from writing scholarly articles.

Every once in a while, I get a little crazy and I look the other direction. This is what that looks like:

So, I guess you could say that things are really pretty exciting right now. Ill be sure to report on my progress in my writing in the next week or two. For now, back to writing...

Related Post: Confessions of a Boring Academic Writer

Sharing Academic Articles Online

I've recently realized that making academic work available and visible is just as important as creating academic work. This is probably pretty obvious to most scholars and writers, but other than publishing in academic journals, I haven't focused a lot of effort on getting my academic work in front of other scholars and practitioners. Sure, having the article actually published in an appropriate peer-reviewed journal is vital, but there are many other things that can be done to get work out there.

I recently made the effort to share pre-publication drafts of most of the academic articles that I have written and had published in academic journals. I want to disseminate my scholarly work as broadly as possible, and while I've shared some of these articles in the past on this blog, I thought it would be a good idea to share them in a more systematic, comprehensive way.

So, here is how I now share my academic articles.

1. My Professional Site.  I had already linked to a couple of my articles, but I updated the list and shared nearly all of the articles that have written or coauthored that have been published or accepted for publication. I used WordPress to create the site, and it was surprisingly easy to create the page and import the documents.
   
2. Academia.edu. I created a profile and shared most of these same articles on that profile. The advantage to this (and similar sites) is that it allows you to tag your articles, which makes it a lot easier for people to find the article. In addition, others using the site follow those tags and follow one another, which facilitates sharing between affinity groups. The site is easy to set up and it is surprisingly easy to share new articles on the site.
3. Twitter and LinkedIn. I have already shared many of my recent articles using these media, but I plan to also share the other articles. I'll also link back to the profile on academia.edu so that the articles get increased exposure. Again, very easy ways to share knowledge.
4. This Blog. I have shared several of my papers here at this blog and use it as a way to share my current ideas and thoughts related to learning, instructional design, and success. I get a lot of traffic to this site, and one of my articles, Applying Merrill's First Principles of Instruction, has been viewed over 2000 times in the last year and a half. It has definitely been a good way to get my work out there. I use blogger for my blog, and it has worked really well.

I think this will be a good start. And another benefit is that I now have specific online locations to share my new articles when they are published, which will make it easy to access and share them with other interested individuals. Any other ideas on how to share academic work?

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

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.