Tips for emerging scholars from #edmedia – getting published

Last week I ended the Ed Media conference in beautiful Victoria British Columbia. Although I signed up to attend the conference because of the content, when I got there I found mysel drawn to a lot of the sessions in the emerging scholars stream.

My take home message from the Getting Published in Educational Technology Journals, presented by Dr. Catherine McLoughlin, included:

• Start with a strategy. Make a plan for where and when you want to publish, including conference proceedings and journals.
• Monitor 10-12 journals. Choose 10-12 journal in your area and sign up for the TOC alerts (emails with the table of contents for each new issue).
• Read lots. In order to be a good academic writer, you need to identify what good academic writing looks like. To do this effectively, you need to read lots of articles.
• Avoid using data (or too much data) in conference papers. Publish in peer reviewed conference proceeds, however, save the data for the associated journal article (which typically can only re-use 1/3 of the conference proceedings article).
• Never let a year go by without publishing something. This goes back to starting with a strategy!

As homework from the session, I decided that I would look for 10-12 journals and sign up for TOC alerts. My first step was to choose journals. I currently have nine on my list covering both educational technology and medical education, which are:

• Educational Technology Research and Development
• British Journal of Educational Technology
• International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
• Computers & Education
• Educational research
• Journal of Computer Assisted Learning
• Medical Teacher
• Medical Education
• BMC Medical Education

Rather than signing up for email alerts, I decided that I would prefer to recieve notifications using my RSS reader. The RSS reader (RSS stands for really simple syndication) allows me to subscribe to updates and read them from any of my devices (computer, iPad, or iPhone). The service that I am using is free, Feedly (http://cloud.feedly.com). The process is pretty simple:

1. Sign up for an account at http://cloud.feedly.com.
2. Download the free Feedly app on my iPhone and iPad.
3. Google search for the specific journal.
4. Find the publishers website.
5. Search the publishers website for the RSS feed (not always that easy to find).
6. Click the feed.
7. Copy the URL.
8. Add the URL into Feedly.

Here is a short YouTube video on how to do it: