Social scholarship and the networked scholar: researching, reading, and writing the web

What does it mean to be a digital/social scholar today? What does it take to be a networked scholar? What complicating and mitigating factors are emerging today for digital and networked scholarship? Those are some of the questions that a group of digitally connected “obnoxious academics” (the Authors) have been wrestling with, first individually and now as a collective, for several years now. The four authors, all literacy teacher educators and former schoolteachers, engaged with social media, new/digital literacies and the new calls for digital scholarship, share their reflections situated in three distinct regions of the United States and Colombia (the Global South). The Authors discuss conceptual and practical considerations and cautionary tales for researchers, students, and practitioners willing to engage in their own digital turns. The goal of this conversation-turned-article is to involve others in a larger dialog about the kind of global and digitally connected networks we need to create in order to develop stronger forms of digital scholarship that truly address the questions and research challenges in contemporary times.