Abstract
Higher education institutions are embracing virtual meetings with practitioners teaming up to tackle a wide range of issues in higher education. Ironically, the case of this multidisciplinary research team has been learning to successfully collaborate for years prior to the pandemic. The initial analysis compared the team's development to competencies described as a combination of data, technological, and human literacies – termed humanics. This chapter moves the discussion to examine shared competency, shared authority, and authentic leadership. Authentic leadership is not a characteristic held by one team member but can be observed across the team. In the closing of this chapter, the researchers will offer insights based on analysis from participating in the psychological safety index and examples of how a team can develop authentic leadership, grow as a collective, along with impacting the emerging field of digital humanities.
TopAutonomous Global Virtual Learning
As higher education strategizes learning modalities and teaching assignments within broader remote learning opportunities, there are new dynamics to be considered. The research team discussed in this chapter are composed of both non-tenure track and tenure track educators. Traditionally, the tenure-track professional is often idealized as a knowledge worker privileged with intellectual freedom in their research. At times there can be friction in the traditional model, where administrators might seek funding and manage the ecosystem’s research strategy. Information Communication Technology (ICT) has grown in various forms, expanding resource networks, connecting fellow researchers, and opening big data opportunities. While academics can indeed tap into these “digital communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1999; Horan & Wells, 2005) in an autonomous fashion—they are doing so largely independently of their home institution’s vision. How do academic leaders in higher education effectively apply their resources for decision making in a way that balances the demands of administration with disciplinary needs and wants? Moreover, how do they maintain and improve upon their own digital network of research? Especially within specific fields, such as the digital humanities (DH), where they may be studying digital community networks themselves?
Key Terms in this Chapter
Shared Affect: How the beings doing an assigned labor feel about the authority doing the delegating of said labor, or the group culture that must be cultivated to perform the social functions of the community.
Global Virtual Teams: Teams formed via information communication technology from globally diverse regions, where success itself is attributed to long-term outcomes based on competencies described as a combination of data, technological, and human literacies that must overcome roadblocks to coordinate and utilize global relationships.
Communities of Practice: Creative networks of expertise tackling complex problems in order to keep up with increased administrative demands while also still progressing their fields of practice.
Digital Humanities: A field of academic study examining the use and application of computational and digital technologies in the humanities and social science scholarship, and a converse utilization of theories and approaches from the humanities in the data and computer sciences.
Shared Authentic Leadership: An organizational executive framework combining both managerial and anarchic scholarship, sensitive to both a shared affective culture and a kind of structural authority that enhances an academic community of practice.
Psychological Safety: Relative feelings of trust and faith in the mutual disciplinary expertise of the team, and of leading by example; a collective phenomenon of trust and competency combined with discursive freedom within a community of practice.
Humanics: An object of study in the digital humanities, i.e., a humanist study of the phenomena formed by the interface between human beings and their digital technologies, such as new kinds of data, communities, or ideologies.