Guidelines for New Media P & T

(presented at the National Extension Conference, St. Louis, MO, Oct 22, 2009).

References & Other Materials-- this is a list of useful resources and materials related to this presentation. You can find other materials tagged in Delicious.

Other posts on this topic:

Should Faculty be required to Publish on the Web for Promotion?
Can Faculty Post Stuff on the Web and get Tenure?
Online Science, Teaching and Outreach with Tenure
Measuring Scientific Contributions on the Web

Evaluating Performance

Here are some sources for understanding and developing metrics for client participation, satisfaction and impact.

Google. (n.d.). Google analytics tour.

Many of the metrics that are essential to reporting on blogs, websites and other new media platforms are available by recording media activities using Google Analytics.

Hughes, Jr., R. (1995). Are a lot of satisfied participants enough? Human Development and Family Life Bulletin,1(3).

Hughes describes a brief example of how satisfaction can be used to monitor program processes.

Lambur, M. (n.d.). Communities of practice evaluation guide.

Lambur provides some useful advice, tools and metrics for evaluating eXtension materials and other new media.

Larsen, D. L., Attkisson, W. A., Hargreaves, W. A., & Nguyen, T. D. (1979). Assessment of client/patient satisfaction: Development of a general scale. Evaluation and Program Planning, 2, 197-207.

The 8-item general scale described in this article can easily be adapted to measure satisfaction of a variety of programs and services.

Criteria for Promotion and Tenure

Anderson, D. L. (2004). (Ed.), Digital scholarship in the tenure, promotion and review process.
Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

This edited volume is one of the few examinations of digital scholarship and the ways in which it can be handled in promotion and tenure. Much of this work focuses on issues that are more central to the humanities, but there are still some useful insights about the overall issues. Anderson in the introductory chapter makes the following point: "it is not that they [scholars] use technology...but that they use technology so well that it transforms their field and the kind of work that is possible in it" (p. 9).

APA Style Guide. http://apastyle.apa.org/

When reporting the creation of information technology-based products it is useful to report these using a standardized format like APA for citing electronic contributions on your vita or annual report.

Extension Metrics Working Group. (Feb. 6, 2009). eXtension scholarship metrics.

Some good ideas of ways to capture contributions to eXtension efforts. These ideas could be applied to other new media activities.

Ippolito, J., Blais, J., Smith, O.F., Evans, S., & Stormer, N. (2009). New criteria for new media. Leonardo, 42, 71-75.

These authors provide one of the most complete descriptions of how new media can be handled in promotion and tenure. They write, "few new-media academics are going to bother with these innovations if their departments' criteria for promotion and tenure recognize only dead-tree journals" (p. 71).

Jensen, M. (2007). The new metrics of scholarly authority. The Chronicle Review, 53.