{"id":1529,"date":"2019-12-06T11:15:15","date_gmt":"2019-12-06T11:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.ucem.ac.uk\/onlineeducation\/?p=1529"},"modified":"2019-12-06T11:26:53","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T11:26:53","slug":"social-media-for-academic-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.ucem.ac.uk\/onlineeducation\/posts\/1529","title":{"rendered":"Social media for academic practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"decorative<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week I ran a workshop on the opportunities presented by social media for academic practice (specifically teaching, research and public engagement). It follows on from running a great many workshops, events and building social media strategies for academic and professional staff, and HE projects\u00a0in my previous institution. I haven’t run one for a few years now, and I decided to take a different approach to my usual ‘this is how you get started’.<\/p>\n

My take is that if you can use a word processor, you can use a social media tool. Just like Microsoft Word social media\u00a0apps can contain a whole depth of features, but you don’t need to know all these to make effective use of the tool, you learn when you need to perform a task and learn from seeing what others do. There\u00a0is a whole heap of training online to learn to use a particular social media platform if you want to be trained. The difficulty if we focus on the training aspect is that it masks the complexities and challenges that are present when using social media in academic practice. Social media has significantly changed the landscape of scholarly communication. Online, our communications and our work are openly visible, searchable, spreadable (Boyd 2014), they have a greater presence and remain long after actual words are uttered\u00a0(a great example of this is the growth of Twitter at academic conferences). What really\u00a0matters \u00a0is developing the skill and confidence needed to negotiate the landscape of social media\u00a0and make decisions about what you want to do and establish boundaries about what you don’t want to do.<\/p>\n

The first important point to understand when using social media in a personal-professional context is that it is not simply\u00a0a marketing tool. Of course it’s lovely to share posts from your institutional social media accounts about the great work going on, but if this is all you do, without commentary or personal insight,\u00a0it’s unlikely that you will build a useful network or people will find you interesting. So, pushing the marketing aspect aside, what remains is\u00a0a space to build an online presence which benefits from and gives benefit to disciplinary and cross-disciplinary communities. Sharing links to research, publications, events,\u00a0reporting on conferences, problem-solving – all linked together by an array of disciplinary hashtags. This academic gift economy is one of the reasons why the sector has really embraced social media. Knowledge is something that is collectively built and we are now able to be part of much wider networks to facilitate this.<\/p>\n

It’s important to acknowledge the risks as well as the opportunities that social media poses, particularly for the academic community. Workshop participants identified the following areas of concern regarding engaging in social media:<\/p>\n