Tag: digitalacademic

Are academics ready to go digital?

This piece is originally published as a letter in the South China Morning Post on July 13, 2020: https://www.scmp.com/comment/letters/article/3092631/coronavirus-made-working-home-new-normal-are-hong-kong-academics

At the end of my last lecture before the Lunar New Year, I wished my students well and jokingly said, “Let’s hope that I don’t have to teach in a mask when we return from the holiday.” Never had we thought it was the last time we would meet in person that semester.Because of Covid-19, universities have been closed and most academics have been working from home since February. My typical day in the past semester revolved around live-streaming my lectures and attending online meetings. Academic conferences I had planned to attend overseas have gone virtual.

Some say being a “digital scholar” has become the new normal because of the pandemic. Are we really ready to go digital, though?

In my recent research project “Knowledge construction and writing online: exploring digital academic discourse and practices in Hong Kong”, I asked academics in Hong Kong to share their experiences and other thoughts about going digital in their profession. Many feel rather ambivalent. While embracing the opportunities offered by digital media, they have reservations. For example, university teachers with small children or other family members working from home have found online teaching particularly challenging. On top of that, they have the pressure of publicising their research widely to generate more “impact” in the non-academic sphere.

That is why many academics around the world also disseminate their research through online means, such as writing research blogs and promoting themselves on Twitter and ResearchGate. That means we are investing additional time and energy in developing social media profiles even after the long process of writing up and publishing our research in traditional journals and books. Another concern is privacy. The academics in my study have expressed concerns about how and where their online content is circulated. All these result in fatigue and anxiety, as reported by multiple colleagues in my research interviews.

While I trust that universities have already provided technical support in preparing staff to go online, academics’ mental readiness and well-being should also be taken care of as that can severely impair the quality of teaching and learning.

About this Blog

This is the project blog for the research project entitled Knowledge Construction and Writing Online: Exploring Digital Academic Discourse and Practices in Hong Kong, funded by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Direct Grant for Research.

Project Summary

Digital media such as blogs, Twitter, and ResearchGate have provided academics with new opportunities to enhance their visibility and publicize their research globally, thus giving rise to new texts and sub-genres which have been referred to as “digital academic discourse”. The emergence of digital academic practices also calls for reconceptualizations of academic writing and knowledge production. The primary aim of this project is to explore the digital writing practices by Hong Kong scholars, and how these practices are potentially shaped by the current context of Hong Kong higher education and institutional policies. Focusing on academics at CUHK from a range of disciplines, this project adopts a mixed methods research design involving online survey, technobiographic interviews, and digital discourse analysis, so as to address the following research questions:

1. What are the discourse features of digital writing produced by scholars in Hong Kong? 

2. How does digital academic discourse impact the production and consumption of knowledge? 

3. In what ways is digital academic discourse shaped by institutional and government policies?

4. For HK Chinese scholars who use English as an additional language, do they draw on multilingual resources in their digital academic discourse? If so, in what ways and to what extent?

The interdisciplinary nature of this project will inform university and government policies related to the assessment of research from a wider range of academic sub-genres. The open access nature of digital academic discourse will also serve as a bridge between academia and the wider public.