What is Effective Scholarly Communication?

There is a popular attitude that communicating information in person will always be superior to doing so from a distance and that factors such as body language, physical gestures and the like can never be reproduced in a virtual environment. This concept is fervently supported by Dreyfus (2001) but the idea of educational embodiment denies the value of recording, absorbing, and reusing information at the time of receiving it - such as the looking up of a URL, checking terminology or even consulting a book at the time of hearing it's mention. With real time communications technologies (MSN, AIM, Skype) as well as, potentially, an enormous virtual reference library to hand at all times it may actually be the case that e-learning (and other forms of online-only scholarly discourse) not only as effective but possibly even more effective than face-to-face methods.

Dreyfus' attitude is however in line with the relatively cautious development of scholarly communications in the digital age. Perhaps this is simply a matter of adjusting to technology and the new methods of communication such technologies introduce (Carrington 2005), perhaps it is a pragmatic issue of the business models and intellectual property attitudes of scholarly publishers as considered by Murray-Rust (2008). Regardless of the reasons for the reluctance to change we are, with the explosion of network level computing and the coming of the semantic web, reaching a timely and important point at which to reassess fully the whole model of scholarly discourse as we know it.

In considering the possibilities of scholarly discourse (whether that be e-learning, essays, theses, scholarly communications, or journal articles) it seems crucial to consider what the most effective and deeply ingrained forms of human communication actually are. Whilst technology has allowed for ever more sophisticated forms of communication, text undoubtedly remains the dominant form of scholarly communication and assessment. Slowly and only marginally more absorbing mediums have been adopted in ways which closely resemble existing methods of communication and delivery. However, there are more approaches that better suit both reader and technology.

While text may be the dominant recorded form of scholarly communication and educational assessment, verbal and visual communication have always been key to physically-taught courses and should therefore also have more prominence in recorded scholarly communications and e-learning. Indeed it is the mixture of multi-modal stimuli and human interaction that makes “real life” compelling and can therefore make the internet and the written word less compelling or at times de-humanizing. Though it's meaning evolves somewhat over time,

"Hypertext most often refers to text on a computer that will lead the user to other, related information on demand. Hypertext represents a relatively recent innovation to user interfaces, which overcomes some of the limitations of written text. Rather than remaining static like traditional text, hypertext makes possible a dynamic organization of information through links and connections (called hyperlinks). Hypertext can be designed to perform various tasks; for instance when a user "clicks" on it or "hovers" over it, a bubble with a word definition may appear, a web page on a related subject may load, a video clip may run, or an application may open."

Wikipedia (2008)

This traditional meaning of hypertext goes some of the way to creating a new way to communicate. But it is with the developments of Web2.0, the widespread uptake of broadband technology and the emergence of the semantic web that scholarly communication has a chance to truly evolve beyond variations on the written word.

In this essay I will be looking at hypertext and what I believe are the key reasons that scholarly communication needs to change and make use of the opportunities new technologies provide. Throughout this essay I will be inserting images, video and sound as well as linking out to other sites. Though this is a conventionally structured essay I intend to combine it’s element in a networked rather than purely linear way and I will be aiming to illustrate some of my ideas through this assignment’s presentation.