Social Media Workshop

Postgraduate

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Participation
active users of social media produce large amounts of content every day such as writing analyses and comments, sharing bibliographic data or posting datasets creative commons agreements foster the gift-economy online as well as academic publishers and other creators of content

Social media theorist, Clay Shirky

"Participants are different. To participate is to act as if your presence matters, as if, when you see something or hear something, your response is part of the event."

Virtual Community
Each platform offers different functionality and has its own culture, which is largely the product of its most active participants

cultures grow and change in response to how participants use the service (Facebook is social, Twitter informational, LinkedIn professional, etc.)

Tools & Services

provide a way to build and maintain global networks of professionals with similar interests

create forums for learning and collaborating not bounded by time, place and/or funding
enable users to filter, recommend and comment on quality (social bookmarking and citation) offer public and private spaces for themed discussions (wikis)

Communication Services
Blogging: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress Microblogging: Twitter, Yammer, Google Buzz

Location: Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places

Social networking : Facebook, LinkedIn, Path Aggregators: Google Reader, Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle

Blogs & micro-blogs

Informal spaces where new ideas and research can be reviewed and discussed in a way similar to conventional academic conferences, but unbounded by time and place.

Ruth Fillery-Travis (PhD, Archaeology)

At this early stage in my career my primary method of dissemination is through my blog.

Collaboration Services
Conferencing: Adobe Connect, GoToMeeting, Skype Social bookmarking: Delicious, Diigo, BibSonomy CiteULike, Mendeley Social news: Digg, Reddit, Newsvine

Wikis: PBworks, Wetpaint, Wikia

Collaboration Services
Social bibliography: CiteULike, Mendeley Social documents: Google Docs, Dropbox, Zoho Project management: Bamboo, Basecamp, Huddle

Social Bookmarking
Tools to search, organize, store, tag and share vast amounts of information and aggregate the collective recommendations of a disciplinary community.

Folksonomies
collection of tags distinguished from the conventionally ordered, official and hierarchical taxonomies of information dynamic and highly flexible, created as you go in a way that suits a particular purpose users can define tags specific to their needs and see how other users cross-file information under multiple tags leading to serendipitous discovery of links they would not otherwise have seen

Elena Golovuskina (PhD student, Education)

I prefer blogging, microblogging, social bookmarking, social citation like Zotero, writing tools, social/professional networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and aggregators and dashboards like Netvibes. They are all integral in my everyday and professional life but for different reasons.

Multimedia Services
Photographs: Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug Video: Viddler, Vimeo, YouTube

Live streaming: Justin.tv, Livestream, Ustream

Presentation sharing: Scribd, SlideShare, Sliderocket Virtual worlds: OpenSim, Second Life, World of Warcraft

Networks
Networks of people with similar interests help you identify valuable resources and information. How you use them will depend on you, your discipline, those around you and the research you are doing. Theres value in weak ties.

Networks for Researchers

ResearchGate is a social networking service aimed at scientists and other researchers. It offers a range of functionality including a semantic search engine that browses academic databases.

Graduate Junction is a social networking service aimed at postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers.
MethodSpace is a social network service for social scientists run by the publisher Sage. Nature Network is a science-focused social network service run by Nature Publishing Group.

Terry Wassall (Principal Teaching Fellow, Sociology)

I think social media made me a better researcher because I find information a lot faster and have a network of individuals I respect that discover, filter and discuss. I have connected my research to the real world in a way that would not have been easy before and maybe not possible. For curriculum development and teaching, social media connects with real issues that interest and engage students and has helped them become student researchers in their own right with a broader and more critical take on issues.

Search
Unlike traditional search technologies that return results based on algorithms and search history, social tools provide alternative approaches to questions based on intelligently-filtered information that helps to stimulate new questions, in the same way that a conversation with a colleague might.

Risks
moving findings into the public domain before they are ready can endanger your ability to publish and potentially provide people with ammunition that they can use against you. The trick is finding a balance between openness and disclosure and of building positive relationships with your collaborators. privacy and copyright related issues

Benefits
tools to filter, share, learn, recommend and review building important networks for feedback, collaboration and publication

Criticism
Some academics fear that the quality of public and academic discussion and debate is being undermined, and the ubiquitous use of the Internet and digital technologies like smartphones are potentially damaging to our thinking, our culture and our society in general.

Growth of Technology
encroachment of technology into every aspect of life has potentially damaging implications technology moves faster than educators and policy makers

Privacy
culture of active personal and professional disclosure changes the interface between public and private spaces and misuse of data employer requests for access to personal passwords and activity

changing and complicated privacy policies, sign-ups and user agreements

Banality
Small bits of information such as status updates and sharing of links have led to the charge that social media are trivial in nature and suitable only for entertainment rather than professional research.

Peripheral
Some researchers believe that social media are still peripheral in research, and this leads some to argue that it is therefore not worth engaging.

Loss of an authoritative perspective?

Traditional publishing aims to provide a filter for quality whereas social media allow everyone to publish without constraint. This inevitably means that it is more difficult to identify which contributions are valuable or authoritative.

Personalization
Personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy.

The Echo-Chamber Online

Group polarization is the idea that group deliberation with like-minded people and insulation from alternate views breeds increasing extremism.

Information overload
Social media have dramatically increased the amount of publiclyavailable information.

The multitasking culture

over-complexity is the enemy of efficient communication, leading to noise rather than information

Work/Life Balance
Social media have the potential to extend your working day and blur the distinction between work and private life. People need to think carefully about boundaries, particularly if they are using mobile devices.

The Academic Research Cycle

1. Identification of knowledge 2. Creation of knowledge

3. Quality assurance of knowledge

4. Dissemination of knowledge

Identification of Knowledge
enhances research capacity and saves time harnesses networks to discover and filter knowledge enables participation in seminars and conferences via podcasts, etc. (literature/peer reviews)

Creation of Knowledge
provides more effective collaboration and immediate feedback raises the profile of your work more rapidly than conventional academic publishing encourages research groups to work together across departmental, institutional and national boundaries

Quality Assurance of Knowledge

competitive funding mechanisms ethical approval academic line-management peer review and peer scrutiny at conferences publication and post-publication review citation

Dissemination of knowledge
Disseminate your research more widely and effectively: consider the tone for publication of scholarly ideas via social media consider the audience (The Head of Department, your peers, your research subjects and the general public may all read what you write)

consider the intellectual property and copyright implications of making your ideas and results available via social media?

The changing media landscape

References
Alan Cann of the Department of Biology at the University of Leicester Konstantia Dimitriou and Tristram Hooley of the International Centre for Guidance Studies