Scholarly Communication

Listen to Episode No.9 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois; and joining us, as well, is James Gee, Regents Professor and Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the generativity of machines.

James Gee : "I fundamentally believe that humans are a screwed-up species — one of the few species that will put themselves out of business in a shorter evolutionary time than any species that has lived on Earth. So, something must be wrong with us. And I think what's wrong with us is, we don't understand what sort of animal we are. That's why our schools are no good — we don't understand how humans really learn. We don't understand what a human really is. We have an elevated view of our own rationality, of our own intelligence, and the consequence is, we are depleting the world. So, the biggest attempt we can still make now is to use everything we can (including Chat) to retheorize who we are as a being before we put ourselves out of existence."

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Listen to this interview of Emad Shihab, Full Professor and Concordia Research Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University, Canada. We talk about authenticating learning and unlocking potential in people — the true ways to innovate research.

Emad Shihab : "To build a vision, I always say, try to make it ambitious and then break it down. So, just saying, 'I want to change the world,' I mean, it's a great vision but the truth is, nobody knows what their part in that is supposed to be — how can they contribute to you changing the world. That’s why, for me, having a vision is — you try to build whatever it is that the vision is meant to do, then you make sure you break it down into smaller pieces so that people can know the parts that they could play in that vision.”

Learn about Create SE4AI

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Listen to this interview of Rebekka Burkholz, faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. We talk about the composition of research groups and of research papers.

Rebekka Burkholz : "I have the feeling that this meta-reading becomes more important as a person's career progresses. Because early on, a researcher is typically very focused on the details of each paper and they try to understand what this method does and so on — and of course, researchers need to begin that way, really spending the time to attain to expertise in a particular focus. But with time, as a researcher has seen more ideas (and of course, in one particular focus, methods and questions all share some similarity), then the person acquires more and more overview as they continue reading. They are reading, essentially, for the links between findings, for implications of the findings and those links — and in this way, a more experienced reader of the research actually becomes engaged in a sort of literature discussion."

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Learn about the fascinating Ethno-Indology series now published at Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing which offers inexpensive peer-reviewed Open Access and Print-on-Demand publishing for scholars from all over the world.

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Are you facing writing roadblocks? There are many guides on how to make your writing match academic standards, so why aren’t there any on how to make yourself actually write? How can you get to PhDone if life keeps getting in the way? Can you get there if you are a care-giver? Facing illness, or work responsibilities? Dealing with anxiety? In the midst of a personal or a global crisis? What practical advice exists to help you get to PhDone in the real world? Scholar and author Dr. Briana Barner joins us to share the practical approaches that worked for her, and that can work for you, in this episode that breaks down what it takes to tackle and finish a big writing project in real life.

Our guest is: Dr. Briana Barner, who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. She received a doctorate in Radio-Television-Film and a doctoral portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Texas. Briana also earned a Master’s in Women’s and Gender Studies from UT. She is an interdisciplinary critical and cultural communications scholar with research interests in Black podcasts, digital and Black feminism, digital media, Black cultural production and representation. Her work has been published in journals including Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, and Film Quarterly. She is currently working on a manuscript about the cultural production of Black podcasts.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also like the episodes on this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes, because knowledge is for everyone. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Listen to this interview of Paris Avgeriou, Editor in Chief of the Journal of Systems and Software (together with David Shepherd). Paris is Full Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. We talk about peer review, journal editing, and scientific writing.

Paris Avgeriou : "I actually think that authoring and reviewing are very close to one another, because when you review a paper, you actually start thinking how to improve it — what the strong points are and also what the points for improvement are. So, by getting into this sort of mentality — that is, by noticing what is wrong with the paper and how to make it better — this makes you a better author, because when you review other people's work, you start to understand what makes a paper strong and what needs revising to make it stronger. And so, when someone who reviews regularly goes to write their own papers, they automatically start thinking about these things. So, in fact, reviewing other people's work makes you a better author yourself."

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Listen to Episode No.8 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. Today we welcome, too, Duane Searsmith, E-Learning Technical Specialist, Information Trust Institute, also at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is the meaning of generation by machine.

It's stunning what Generative AI can produce, but what exactly is it there that is being produced? What does it mean, and what do we do with it? And actually, more important, what do we do with the AI that's doing the producing?

AI in our lives now and will continue infiltrating and embedding only more as each day passes and each new update and redesign is released. Therefore, we are the responsible parties in this — we, us, the users. We are the ones we must ask: What does AI mean to us? Because what AI just means, itself... well, that is still only whatever we can mean, ourselves.

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Listen to this interview of David Shepherd, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Systems and Software (together with Paris Avgeriou). David Shepherd is Associate Professor at Louisiana State University. We talk about writing well, researching well, reviewing well.

David Shepherd : "No, with the manuscripts we screen and review and publish, it's not about language. So, we know that most scientists are writing in not their first language. And for us, it's just not about that. I mean, some of the best papers I've read even have some kind of weird phrases that make me think that maybe the authors didn't grow up speaking English as their first language. But the logic in those papers is just so clear that no one worries about that kind of little phrasing stuff. Because, the thing that an experienced editor looks for is just clear logic."

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Authorship represents a new area of policy-related work within higher education research administration, funding agencies, and scholarly journal publishing. Developing Authorship and Copyright Ownership Policies: Best Practices (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) by Allyson Mower offers the unique aspect of combining details on copyright ownership as well as authorship into a single volume on best practices for administrators, journal publishers, research managers, and policy drafters within and outside of higher education. Discover more about the definition of 'author'--from data gatherer to writer--to inform policy development while understanding the interconnected relationships between authorship, copyright ownership, and scholarly communication. This book will also demonstrate how to develop inclusive and equitable authorship policies that reflect the range of diversity within the research endeavor and scholarly publishing.

Allyson Mower, MA, MLIS has served as the scholarly communication and copyright librarian at the University of Utah Marriott Library since 2008. Her expertise focuses on authorship—both current and historical trends—as well as the connections between information access, reading, and authoring. She developed the Utah Reading Census, an annual survey to determine Utahns’ attitudes towards reading and convened the France Davis Utah Black Archive in 2021. Allyson also serves as the policy liaison for the Academic Senate and runs a professional development book club.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Listen to Episode No.7 of All We Mean, a Special Focus of this podcast. All We Mean is an ongoing discussion and debate about how we mean and why. The guests on today's episode are Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, professors at the University of Illinois. In this episode of the Focus, our topic is This is what language means.

It is text, and it is speech — but is not the two wholly as one. It is speech, and then it is text, or it is the other way around — but the two cannot be one, because between them opens a gulf of difference: Text is the one extreme — the other end of which is Speech.

And neither makes — nor the two together can make what the digital is for us today. We read images as much as we do print. Music and sounds are louder than speech in many regions of the online. Video brings movement to life, while the moving body or the object in motion makes space visible. All this is called virtual reality for good reason. We call it all the cyber-social.

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