Emergent scholarship

Course Lessons

Sharing information

13 min read

Lesson overview

Objective: Increase your career capital by sharing what you learn

Summary: While many academics share links and sources on social media, relatively few share insights that demonstrate the intellectual work they’ve done with those sources. The difference between retweeting an article and offering critical commentary represents the difference between adding minimal value and contributing genuine insight to your professional community. When you share processed information rather than raw sources, you build career capital—the skills, connections, and reputation that create opportunities for advancement and impact. This lesson establishes practices for sharing work that demonstrates your thinking and creates value for others.

Key habits:

  • Share something useful with someone at least once daily (even if just to one person)
  • Add your own commentary or synthesis when sharing sources rather than passing them along without context
  • Look for opportunities to transform private work into shareable formats (blog posts, newsletters, presentations)
  • Focus on sharing processed insights rather than unprocessed information
  • Remember that value comes from depth of insight, not breadth of distribution

Introduction

Writing is inherently a topic in psychology. It’s a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind. - Steven Pinker (2014)

Sharing closes the loop on information management. You’ve filtered sources, captured materials, extracted key information, and processed it into understanding. Now you contribute that understanding back to your professional community.

You’ve built a system for managing information that moves from filtering sources to capturing promising materials, extracting relevant content, and processing that content into personal understanding. This system creates tremendous value for your own work—better research, more informed teaching, clearer thinking about disciplinary problems. But this value remains largely invisible to others unless you share it.

Sharing is where individual knowledge work becomes scholarly contribution. The distinction between academic work and scholarship lies precisely here: academic work involves transforming information into understanding for yourself; scholarship involves sharing that understanding to create value for your professional community. When you share what you’ve learned, processed, and understood, you contribute to collective knowledge while simultaneously building your own academic profile and career capital.

Yet many academics hesitate to share their work, particularly work-in-progress or partial insights. They wait until ideas are fully formed, until arguments are complete, until prose is polished. This perfectionism creates a paradox: the academics who most need to build career capital through sharing (early-career scholars, those seeking promotion, researchers establishing reputations) are precisely those most likely to withhold sharing until work reaches an impossibly high standard.

Meanwhile, academics who do share actively online often fall into a different trap: sharing without adding value. Retweeting articles, posting links to interesting papers, and forwarding newsletters all technically constitute sharing. But these actions add minimal value to your professional community and build minimal career capital for you. Anyone can retweet a link. What distinguishes valuable sharing is the addition of your own thinking—commentary, synthesis, critical perspective, or application to specific contexts.

Understanding career capital

Career capital represents the value you offer to institutions, colleagues, and your discipline. It accumulates through demonstrating skills, building connections, and establishing reputation. Different from purely transactional measures like publication counts or citation metrics, career capital reflects the more holistic question: What can you offer that makes others want to work with you, learn from you, or support your advancement?

Components of career capital

Demonstrated expertise shows colleagues that you understand your field deeply and can contribute meaningfully to ongoing conversations. This expertise becomes visible through sharing: writing blog posts that synthesise research on a topic, giving presentations that frame problems in illuminating ways, or offering commentary that reveals sophisticated understanding.

Professional connections expand through sharing because valuable content naturally attracts people working on similar problems. When you share insights about assessment practices, academics interested in assessment take notice. When you offer thoughtful commentary on methodological debates, researchers working with those methods engage. These connections create opportunities for collaboration, mentorship, and career advancement that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

Reputation and visibility develop when colleagues recognise you as a source of valuable thinking in particular domains. This doesn’t require massive social media followings or viral content. It means being known among relevant colleagues as someone who contributes useful insights. When opportunities arise—invitations to collaborate on projects, speaking invitations, editorial positions—they typically go to people whose sharing has made their expertise visible.

The value-friction relationship

A useful heuristic for evaluating sharing is considering the relationship between value added and friction involved. Retweeting a link has virtually no friction—it takes seconds. But it also adds virtually no value. Anyone following that account can retweet the same link. Your particular retweet is largely interchangeable with others.

In contrast, writing a short blog post synthesising three articles on a topic requires considerably more friction—perhaps an hour of work. But it adds substantial value. You’ve done intellectual work that others benefit from: identifying relevant sources, extracting key arguments, synthesising different perspectives. This is not interchangeable—it reflects your particular understanding and synthesis.

Higher friction sharing generally creates more value and builds more career capital. This doesn’t mean you should never share quick links or retweet interesting content. But your most valuable sharing involves substantive intellectual work that demonstrates your thinking and creates resources others find useful.

Forms of valuable sharing

Sharing takes many forms beyond social media posts and retweets. Understanding the range of sharing possibilities helps identify opportunities appropriate to your context and comfortable given your preferences.

Informal sharing

Email: Sending a colleague or student an article with a brief explanation of why you thought they’d find it relevant demonstrates attention to their work and adds value through curation. Similarly, summarising a resource for your teaching team with notes on how it might inform curriculum development shares intellectual work that benefits others.

Social media commentary: Rather than just retweeting, add your own commentary. A thoughtful three-sentence observation about why a paper matters or what surprised you about the findings adds substantial value. This doesn’t require comprehensive analysis—just evidence that you engaged thoughtfully.

Conversation: Sharing happens in person too. Faculty meetings, supervision sessions, and colleague conversations all provide opportunities to share insights from your reading and thinking. Often these informal moments have more immediate impact than formal publications.

Structured sharing

Blog posts: Short-form writing (500-1500 words) that synthesises research, explains concepts, or explores problems in your field creates accessible resources that build expertise visibility. Blog posts don’t require the formality or comprehensiveness of journal articles, making them more sustainable for regular sharing.

Newsletters: Email newsletters to students, colleagues, or broader professional communities can share reading recommendations, synthesise recent developments, or offer reflections on teaching and research. The regular schedule creates accountability for consistent sharing.

Presentations: Conference presentations, departmental seminars, and workshop facilitation all represent sharing. The intellectual work you’ve done processing information becomes visible to colleagues, building your reputation and creating opportunities for connection.

Teaching materials: Sharing syllabi, assignment designs, or teaching resources contributes to pedagogical scholarship while demonstrating expertise in course design. Many academics undervalue this form of sharing, but strong teaching resources build substantial career capital, particularly at teaching-focused institutions.

Formal scholarship

Publications: Journal articles, book chapters, and books represent the most traditional form of scholarly sharing. While slower and more demanding than other forms, formal publications create lasting contributions and remain central to academic career advancement.

Professional and public writing: Articles in professional magazines, policy briefings, or public-facing venues extend scholarly work to broader audiences. This sharing builds career capital by demonstrating impact beyond purely academic circles.

Strategic sharing practices

Effective sharing isn’t simply publishing or posting whenever you’ve created something. Strategic practices help you share consistently while managing the time investment required.

Sharing as workflow integration

Rather than treating sharing as a separate activity added to your workload, integrate it into existing workflows. When you process information and create concrete outputs (see the previous lesson on processing), those outputs often need minimal adaptation to become shareable resources.

A synthesis note bringing together multiple sources could become a blog post with minor editing. Critical commentary you wrote during processing might become a Twitter thread. Teaching materials you developed for your own courses could be shared with colleagues facing similar pedagogical challenges.

Look for sharing opportunities in work you’re already doing. The additional time investment then becomes modest—perhaps 15 minutes to adapt internal notes into shareable format rather than an hour creating sharing content from scratch.

Audience considerations

Different sharing formats suit different audiences. Blog posts work well for discipline-specific insights aimed at colleagues. Email summaries suit smaller groups like your research team or teaching collaborators. Social media reaches broader but more diverse audiences, requiring more accessible language and framing.

Consider who would find this valuable when deciding what and how to share. Methodological insights might interest research methods instructors. Assessment frameworks could help programme directors. Your PhD supervision strategies might benefit other supervisors. Targeting sharing to relevant audiences increases impact while reducing the pressure to make everything universally appealing.

Sustainable frequency

Many academics either share nothing (perfectionism paralysis) or attempt unsustainable sharing schedules that lead to burnout. Find a frequency you can maintain long-term rather than pursuing intense but temporary sharing bursts.

Daily sharing sounds demanding, but remember it can be as simple as emailing one relevant resource to one colleague with brief context. Weekly blog posts might work for some; monthly might suit others better. The specific frequency matters less than consistency and sustainability.

Start smaller than you think necessary. It’s easier to increase sharing frequency once you’ve built the habit than to maintain an ambitious schedule that quickly becomes burdensome.

Pause and reflect

Pause and reflect

It’s easy to spend excessive time curating information to share, falling into the trap of creating perfect newsletters or comprehensive resource lists that require hours to compile. While thoughtful curation has value, your job isn’t to flag everything potentially interesting for colleagues. Most people already face information overload; adding more volume, even well-intentioned volume, rarely helps.

Focus your sharing on processed insights—things you’ve thought about, synthesised, or applied in your own work—rather than merely passing along interesting sources. This distinction keeps your sharing valuable rather than contributing to the noise you’ve worked to filter out of your own information environment.

Also recognise that sharing is inherently vulnerable. You’re making your thinking visible, which means making your uncertainty, questions, and works-in-progress visible. The temptation to wait until ideas are perfect before sharing is strong. But scholarship requires working in public to some degree. Not everything you share will resonate or prove useful. This is normal and acceptable. Share without expecting overwhelming response, and occasionally be pleasantly surprised when insights connect powerfully with others.

Finally, different disciplines and institutions have different norms around sharing. Some fields embrace public scholarship and social media engagement; others view it suspiciously. Some institutions recognise diverse forms of sharing in promotion cases; others focus narrowly on traditional publications. Understand your context while also recognising that scholarly communication is evolving. Finding approaches to sharing that feel authentic to you while respecting disciplinary norms creates sustainable practices.

Activity

Key takeaways

  • Career capital accumulates through demonstrating value to your professional community. Publications matter for academic advancement, but career capital includes broader visibility, demonstrated expertise, and professional connections. Sharing your thinking—through blog posts, email commentary, presentations, teaching resources, and social media insights—builds career capital by making your expertise visible to colleagues who might collaborate with you, cite your work, or support your advancement.

  • Value added outweighs distribution breadth. Retweeting to 1,000 followers adds minimal value and builds minimal career capital. Sending a thoughtful synthesis to three colleagues facing a specific problem adds substantial value even with tiny reach. Focus on the intellectual work of processing and contextualising information rather than merely amplifying sources. The friction involved in creating valuable sharing—synthesising multiple sources, adding critical commentary, explaining applications—is precisely what makes it valuable.

  • Sharing processed insights beats sharing raw information. Your professional community doesn’t need more links to articles or sources—that’s not sharing; that’s forwarding. What creates value is sharing your thinking about those sources: synthesis across multiple papers, critical perspective on methodological approaches, applications to specific teaching contexts. This processed sharing demonstrates your intellectual work while creating resources others can actually use.

Resources

Do you have any experiences or insights that you’d like to share with others? What habits and routines have you implemented in your own practice that have helped in this area? Do you have any questions about your specific context that are not addressed in this lesson? Please leave a comment for other participants in the field below.

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