The January 2006 issue of the British Journal of Educational Technology has an interesting article ‘Where do educational technologists really publish? An examination of successful emerging scholars’ publication outlets’ by Alison Carr-Chellman (Vol 37 No 1 2006 pp5-15). The author has surveyed educational technologists who gained tenure between 1999 and 2004 to determine where they published. The idea was to see if there was an ‘A’ list of journals where ed techies can publish their articles as a way to give a leg-up to those seeking a career in ed tech. You may be relieved (or possibly disappointed) to hear that apparently there isn’t a premier league of top journals to aim for. The majority of those who were surveyed cast their peer reviewed publications far and wide in the literature, possibly reflecting the diverse nature of the subject.
But that’s not what interested me about this article. For me the thing that I found most interesting was that there was no mention of peer reviewed publication on the Internet or the blogosphere, even as an option to traditional journal publication. We seem to have two communities at work, those who seek to publish their work on the Interweb and those who seek the established route or peer reviewed publication. Are these two communities populated by different groups of people? Or are published educational technologists also moonlighting as edubloggers and vice versa? What I’d like to see is a survey of how many established (choose your own criteria) educational technologists are leading, or attempting to lead a double life as both published scholars and active bloggers. A bit like professional journalists who blog.
It seems like only yesterday but it was more than two years ago that I wrote a note about David Wiley’s Pitch Journal peer reviewed publishing project. Sadly Pitch looks defunct (apologies to David if it has moved or taken on another guise) but it was a nice idea. Maybe it’s time to create a new pitch and take a fresh look at creating a peer reviewed scholarly edublogging community. Is there academic credibility in weblogging?