Prezi

Digital Researcher #druwe

/ Paul Spencer / 7 Comments

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

/ Paul Spencer / 9 Comments

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!

Never the Twain Shall Meet

/ Paul Spencer / 2 Comments

I recently attended the Vitae Researcher Development International Conference in Manchester. This is a gathering of folks who are involved in the skills development of postgraduate research students and research staff where updates on policy and strategic initiatives are discussed. It also serves as a way for all of us skills development types to share practice, find out what’s going on etc.

I was leading a workshop at the conference entitled “Never the Twain Shall Meet: Bringing Research Leaders and Early Career Researchers Together to Discuss Career Development” together with an independent facilitator, Kate Tapper from Bud Development. What we set out to do was to share the experience we had of organising an event for the UWE Researchers’ Forum designed to bring research staff and their managers (Principal Investigators or PIs for short) together to have some discussions about the best way to support the career development of research staff. The main way we did this was to use metaphors to critically examine the issues around career development of researchers yet remaing objective and impersonal.

We thought this worthy of sharing because of the difference in perspectives between the research staff and their PIs was really interesting. The Prezi I used in the workshop is shown below.

 

Never the Twain Shall Meet on Prezi

We had been planning to run this development event for sometime before we did because research staff were telling us that they felt that their PIs needed to be more involved in assisting researchers to make career development choices. I was a bit nervous about how it might work because not all PIs share the same views on how high a priority should be placed on skills development (particularly of the “generic” or “transferable” nature) in terms of the perceived success of a researcher. I was also nervous about how likely it was that we could attract a significant number of PIs to a career development event for early career researchers given the other considerable demands on their time. I am not alone in sensing that trepidation as was confirmed at the Vitae Conference.

So here’s what we learned from running this event:-

  1. We needn’t have worried about the PIs & Researchers not being engaged; they were!
  2. More communication/constructive dialogue between PIs and researchers would be beneficial
  3. The perspectives of the PIs were quite different to those of the researchers
  4. The researchers wanted more information about how things work in research
  5. The PIs felt the need to shield researchers from the external strategic pressures placed upon them
  6. Researchers wanted to make the choices that were right for them as individuals, even if that meant “jumping ship” or changing course

The outcomes of this event were:-

  1. We organised a follow up event where senior managers explained how the funding of research works at UWE and how it fits together with institutional research strategy including how we are approaching the Research Excellence Framework (REF)
  2. The Researchers’ Forum has attracted more research staff representatives for the planning group
  3. The Researchers’ Forum is having an increasing influence on research staff issues at UWE
  4. More PIs and senior managers are engaging with the issues raised by research staff and are willing to contribute their knowledge/experience to research staff events

I’d really appreciate hearing from researchers or researcher development colleagues about their experience of bringing researchers and their managers together to work on improving the career development prospects of research staff.