Digital $%#@ smarts a lot! An autoethnographic account of academic work

Digital technologies and eLearning afford many rewards and pleasures including enabling academic work to be smarter rather than harder. This chapter is an autoethnographic (Ellis, 1999) account of academic work. Specifically, as an exploratory study, I investigate my relationship with the digital world over two years, with an emphasis on my own digital literacies (Bawden, 2001, 2008; Gilster, 1997; Martin, 2006) and pedagogies. Initially I drew on a year of field texts (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) including emails, screen shots, personal journal notes, video, and electronic documents. I noticed themes such as displeasure, pain, frustration, and anger occurring in relation to my digital world. Identifying an absence of narratives in the literature about academic work in relation to digital experiences, I took more notice of the negative feelings in the second year of this project and created narratives that represented my experiences. These narratives, what I term digital bytes, are by no means universal but provide some insight into available subject positions and pedagogies to learn an academic digital habitus. I explore smarting as a significant outcome in academic work and embodiment of the digital. Smarting, in a negative sense, is not a useful outcome for university business or for educational change that is positive, proactive, sustainable, or even intellectually, digitally, or pedagogically smart. If intellectual work, in partnership with technology, is to remain central to universities, we need to be cognisant of how academics learn an academic self, our pedagogical work in teaching and research, and the professional and public pedagogy of the institution in relation to technology. I discuss implications for learning by those doing academic work and for the institutional employers attempting to facilitate engagement with the digital world.