Digital media enable new ways and dimensions of production, distribution and reception of knowledge. This media change also offers great potential for the academic world: scholars can take advantage of an expansive range of knowledge more easily, collaborative work is facilitated, outcomes can be published and discussed much faster and teaching is provided with new formats for a broad perception. However, scholars regularly encounter structural, juridical, economic and many other problems when making use of the potentials of digital media.

The conference “Open Knowledge? Potentials of Digital Publishing in the Academic World“ aims to strengthen the interdisciplinary awareness and reflection of the potentials of digital media in many ways. Firstly, it will explore the way digital media are being used by students and young scholars and how the digital universities of the future will work. It will also outline the impact of these changes on the public sphere and the social position of academia.

Secondly, it will focus on the potentials of digital publishing and the free distribution of digital knowledge: Fast and broad digital availability of academic papers and monographs as well as the possibility for a global community to comment and discuss them openly allows a more intensive, more transparent, more collaborative and, consequently, a more academic way of verifying knowledge. Prof. Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick (New York City/@kfitz), who is one of the leading theorists and practitioners of academic digital publishing, will give the central keynote on these topics.

The final presentations will reflect on more practical questions: What are the standards of a good digital academic publication? Are academic libraries an agent of these changes? Can scholars make their texts digitally accessible? And how do students and laypersons make sense of online information? A final panel discussion with all speakers will complete the conference.

REGISTRATION

The conference is open and participation is free of charge. If you plan to attend, please send an e- mail to Kristina Petzold (see below). This will help us to calculate the number of participants properly.
Registration and organisational questions: Kristina Petzold: blog [at] global-young-faculty.de

PARTICIPATION: hashtag, live-stream, weblog and videos

The Twitter hashtag of the conference is #gyf3ok. We are planning a live-stream, you will find final information on gyf-blog.de/konferenzen. The videos of the presentations and discussions will be available for download, comments and discussion after the conference on the weblog of the Global Young Faculty: gyf-blog.de and its video-channel.

ORGANISATION

The conference is organized by the working group “Potentials of Digital Media in the Academic World”, which is part of the Global Young Faculty III. The Global Young Faculty provides a platform for outstanding and dedicated young scholars from the Ruhr region to meet, to work on interdisciplinary projects and to receive new stimuli for their own academic research. The interdisciplinary working group has concentrated on the potentials of digital learning and digital publishing in the academic world during the last 18 months in an intensive way. It will present several findings of its group projects during the conference. After the conference, members of the Global Young Faculty III will position themselves towards questions that have been asked during the conference.
Conference concept and press contact: Dr. Thomas Ernst as representative of the working group “Potentials of Digital Media in the Academic World”: thomas.ernst [at] uni-due.de