Digital Researcher #druwe

Social media on electronic displayThis week I ran a workshop at UWE on the use of social media in the context of research. This workshop is along similar lines to a workshop that I ran in February 2012 for researchers and a workshop at the Vitae Conference in September 2012 for researcher skills developers from across the country.

Some context then about this workshop; researchers are changing the way they use digital tools in the context of their research. There is lots of work going on as part of the wider JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme including work being carried out by Vitae to better understand the development needs of researchers.

I’m interested in the digital literacy of researchers for a couple of reasons:

1) It surely makes sense to better understand how researchers use digital tools in the context of research so that we are better able to support them

2) I believe that these digital tools are key to researchers building their own professional profile in an increasingly competitive academic research environment.

The slides I used to support this workshop are below.

Prezi for #druwe

Prezi for #druwe

 

We started out the morning by highlighting some of the hopes & fears that researchers have about using social media tools… I predicted that the fears would fall into three broad categories:

  1. Information overload – the fear that engaging in social media would be too much information to keep track of
  2. Digital Identity – concern over what to share about oneself, privacy issues and the blurring of private versus professional
  3. Data/intellectual property concerns – what happens if I share something that someone else exploits/stealing of ideas
Hopes and fears

Hopes and fears

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?

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

 

Twitter

We asked the participants to use twitter to interact with their networks using the hashtag #druwe

https://twitter.com/UWEGradSchool/status/833993171273187328

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.

Using social media tools in research

There is increasing concern about ensuring rigour when using digital tools to gather research data. At UWE, we have some guidance available on the Research Ethics pages. I think there is still some way to go to understand better how this area of social media use can be supported.

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

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”

The Vitae/Open University “Social Media Handbook for researchers and supervisors”

Thanks to the researcher who attended both physically and virtually!

Digital Researcher #druwe Feb 2012

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–

druweprogramme.pdf
Download this file

We started out the morning by highlighting some of the hopes & fears that researchers have about using social media tools…

Hope_and_fears

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

Twitter

We asked the participants to use twitter to interact with their networks using the hashtag #druwe

https://twitter.com/#!/ZeeniyaKamil/status/164670413316698112

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.

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

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 Researcher Evaluation – blog style

On Tuesday 14th June, we ran a course at UWE entitled “Becoming a digital researcher” (#druwe) which was facilitated by Dr Tristram Hooley from the University of Derby with a little help from me. Throughout the day we covered:-

  • Personal Learning Environment – How and where do we get our information from
  • Social Media Tools – The technical bit of using tools is less important that the wider principle of exploiting networks to enhance your personal learning environment
  • Networks – It really is all about your networks, the strength of them. It is that that pays dividends when using social media in your research area

I am reposting the slides that Tristram used on the day below: 

 

druwe.ppt
Download this file

What Tristram and I would like is for participants of the day is to give us some feedback on how it went, the content, the delivery with a view to understanding what it is that we can do to make it better. Neither of us are “gurus” of social media but we both have experience of being researchers and using some of the tools available. Did we get it right?

I noticed that Ann Grand has written a reflective blog entry about the day and I would encourage you to either do something similar (it will give an excuse to write another blog entry!) or use the comments section below this post to add your thoughts. 

Thanks for taking the time to attend.

Becoming a Digital Researcher – #druwe

Social media is booming. You can now find user generated content in just about all spheres of life; politics, music, history, you name it and it can be found. What about the field of academic research? Are the critics right to sneer at social media as being trivial time-wasting activities or could there be a real benefit to the researchers who do engage using more of the tools at their disposal? As with most things it would appear that there are pros and cons but with the right tools in the right context, it can be an effective way for researchers to raise their profile, swap ideas, get feedback and, possibly, find that all important next job.

This is why that next week, I’m glad that we are running a workshop at UWE entitled “Becoming a Digital Researcher”. This is going to be a hands on demonstration of some of the social media tools that are being used in academic research. I’m especially pleased that Tristram Hooley will be leading the day, he was one of the authors of a Research Information Network publication on this topic: Social Media: A Guide for Researchers who also has his own (very good) blog called Adventures in Career Development.

I’m also interested in how these social media tools have evolved and become part of the toolkit that researchers can access, I can recall clearly how the web based tools moved on at pace throughout my own research degree journey and I like to think that I keep up with some of them!

In thinking about this post, I came across the infographic below from Fred Cavazza which shows the current landscape with respect to social media, an attempt to classify what is out there. Just by looking back at his similar diagrams over the past four years demonstrates how quickly things progress!

5260700799_6b27dab736_b

The social media landscape 2011, a mapping of the types of social media tools in use

 

If you are interested in following the goings on via twitter we will be using the hashtag #druwe 

If you are interested in coming along in person, drop me an e-mail paul.spencer@uwe.ac.uk