On Wednesday the 1st February, we ran a workshop at UWE on the use of social media in the context of research. This follows on from a similar workshop that we ran in June 2011 for researchers and a workshop in December for researcher skills developers from the SW and Wales.
This time I was joined by John Igoe from Vitae, the website development manager and all round digitally literate bod to co-facilitate the day. John is also the project manager for one of the JISC funded programmes entitled “Developing Digital Literacies”
We have been practicing what we preach in the period leading up to the workshop by using online tools to collaborate in working up a programme for the day. The prezi we used is below.
John & I didn’t meet face to face to prepare the content for this workshop (although we do know each other reasonably well) so we used online collaboration tools to shape the content for the day.
Prezi was used to make the presentation which you can edit remotely & collaboratively. We used the direct messaging function on twitter to make suggestions and google docs to record our thoughts on the order of the programme–
We started out the morning by highlighting some of the hopes & fears that researchers have about using social media tools…
Hopes
Basic overview of what is out there
Getting research out there
To become more aware of others with similar interest & activities to my own
Catch up with colleagues who use twitter/blogs naturally
Which button do I press?
How to quantify opinion (or research data) gathered via social media tools
Fears
Maintaining privacy
Managing a digital reputation
How do I edit the digital me?
Will this become another distraction?
I fear that I have been brainwashed by Clay Shirky‘s Cognitive Surplus too much!
Digital Identity
We spent some time discussing online identity, how to balance the “personal me” vs the “professional me”, how different tools lend themselves to different purposes and how actively managing information about yourself is a good thing to do.
“We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it”. – Erik Qualman
We asked the participants to use twitter to interact with their networks using the hashtag #druwe
#druwe researchers at UWE trying out twitter to interact with a wider network. What are the benefits?— Paul Spencer (@paulspencer42) February 1, 2012
https://twitter.com/#!/ZeeniyaKamil/status/164670413316698112
Sorting out my twitter lists – long overdue.
#tidytwittertidymind#druwe— Rachel Hagen (@rachelmhagen) February 1, 2012
Power of networks
We discussed a little bit of network theory, illustrated by this video for a TEDx talk by Zella King
Managing information overload
We had a look at portals and aggregators to help manage information streams.
Feeling a bit backwards – didn’t know all these google things existed. Hello google reader
#druwe— Rachel Hagen (@rachelmhagen) February 1, 2012
Now taking bookmarking to whole new (virtual) level. Looking at the benefits of Google Reader
#druwe— Zainab Rahman (@zainab_rahman) February 1, 2012
Using social media tools in research
We discussed how research is social & iterative, the benefits of engaging with folks far and wide about your research outputs and how to use tools to make the finding out about knowledge a little easier. We had a play around with some social citation tools, e.g. CiteULike, Zotero & Mendeley
Found some interesting online tools today. mendeley.com, Google Reader & prezi.com
#druwe My inner geek is rather excited— Carly (@Carlybag) February 1, 2012
Just imported my pdf files into mendeley. This is something I will def use all the time, very useful.
#amazeballs#druwe— Rachel Hagen (@rachelmhagen) February 1, 2012
Blogs
We discussed why folks blog – a variety of reasons including:- organising thoughts, mind dump, getting feedback at an early stage etc.
This blog is a just one such example!
Netiquette
Summed up with “Common sense!”
Other sources of information
Here’s a list of things that I have come across recently on the topic of social media in research (clearly not exhaustive!)
A blog about blogging in an academic research context from Imperial College – some really interesting advice and guidance here.
The Networked Researcher blog site which promotes the use of social media tools for researchers – “Digital Professionalism – what not to share”
The British Library – Help for Researchers – “Web 2.0 as a social science research tool”
The Guardian Higher Education site – discussing benefits of blogging as a researcher – “How blogging helped me find my research voice”
The Research Information Network site – “Social Media: A Guide for Researchers”
Thanks to the researcher who attended both physically and virtually!
The Digital Doctorate 
Enlightening day. I’d be interested to hear of social networking academic papers.
This was an interesting day… I can now see where I might experiment with social media in my research day job.
I thought I was fairly versed in Social Media, but through this workshop I gained a great insight into aggregators such as Google Reader and Mendeley … Really interesting tools for organising online data. Great help, thanks
Enlightening day with Paul and John. I’d be interested to hear of academic papers on using social media
Great workshop from Paul and John today. I will definitely be using my new knowledge to take my social media skills to the next level – starting with Google Reader.
Great day. Very informative for a ludite like me. Its given me a clear picture of what I should address in terms of social networking to both aid my research and my professional profile. Thanks.
A thought provoking day – I may need a month (or so) to digest the wealth of information. I wondered at what point will workshops like this become mandatory for University employers?
Great workshop. learned lots of new things and very useful information.
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