Social Media for Academics
Introduction
This page provides a brief description of just some of the many social media sites used for academic collaboration. Before using any social media in your work, please read the University's social media guidelines for advice on using such media successfully and avoiding pitfalls.
Elgg
The BTG Elgg is available to all projects we fund as a tool for networking, collaboration and file sharing. For example, it provides a way for project groups to have discussions that are stored together in one place (rather than a collection of emails) and to share and comment on documents.
In general, the Elgg platform boasts a powerful data model engine for constructing customer- and client-based social media networks. It features excellent integration with existing API, allowing the creation of unique modules for individual purposes. The software boasts excellent activity stream functionality and user management is exceptionally well developed.
Wikis
A wiki is a simple website that allows the creation and editing of interlinked web pages via a web browser, and can be used collaboratively by groups of users. It is a useful way for a multidisciplinary research group to discuss a topic, plan a meeting or share ideas for a grant proposal. Unlike with email, all contributions on a topic are kept together and in order. All University of Exeter staff are welcome to use the Bridging the Gaps Wiki.
Facebook presents both an opportunity and a potential hazard for academic research and education. Before considering setting up a work-related Facebook account, University of Exeter staff need to consult the University's guidance on using Facebook and contact the Web Team to discuss their requirements.
The registration process is straightforward and Facebook can link to your email account to suggest virtual friends. You can enter basic profile information and a photo if you wish. Avoid sharing the types of information used by banks for security.
You can create groups and 'fan pages' to collaborate with colleagues. Groups allow you to share comments, ideas and photos. A fan page can be used to promote a project or research interest and tends to be used as a source of corporate information, where fans of a site can leave comments and discuss a product or service. They also allow you to draw on your followers as a 'crowd sourcing engine'. The University of Exeter has an official fan page.
In the world of social media platforms, few compare to Twitter in terms of scope and appeal. If you are looking for like-minded colleagues for an academic project, Twitter is a useful database of people summed up with astounding brevity. You can use the search function without being a member, but to get the most out of it, you can contribute to discussions and become a source of unique information, while adhering to the mechanics of Twitter.
How does it work?
Say you wanted to promote a research conference: you could 'tweet' a message to your followers saying "[subject] conference on 23rd October". They may in turn spread the message to their followers by 're-tweeting' (or 'rt'), until people all over the world know about your conference ('viral marketing'). Twitter is like a megaphone, but you have to turn it in the right direction towards the right audience and then prove yourself as a valuable source of information ('crowd sourcing'). You need to give advice, opinions, describe your interests and provide links to relevant web pages.
Why use Twitter?
Before you do anything else, it is important think about what you want to use Twitter for, considering:
- What do I want from Twitter? To learn? To mine a new educational and research resource? To make new connections with like-minded academics? For fun?
- How am I going to engage with Twitter? Will I proactively seek out followers to exchange knowledge with? Follow others but not reciprocate? Engage as a one-off for a meet up? Give this some careful thought because as in real life, once you start building a reputation online it can be quite challenging to change.
- Again, University staff should read the official guidance on Twitter and to contact the Web Team before setting up an account related to work. The University also has a Twitter account: ID @uniofexeter, which staff can use.
Can Twitter help break down communication barriers between academics in different disciplines? It is a whole new way of communicating; one that requires brevity and clarity of posts to be successful. Describing a complex method in 140 characters would not be an easy feat.
Academia.edu
Academia.edu is built on the Facebook model of social networking, but geared towards academic researchers. You can update your status, e.g. with current events that may be of interest to others; but this is not the place to discuss what you had for breakfast this morning. You can only upload one photo of yourself and there is no inbox or chat functionality. However, you can upload, track and download academic papers, sometimes as they are being written, as academics ask for peer reviews of drafts. You can pose questions to your followers in a similar way to on Twitter, but with a much higher character limit. You can easily invite colleagues to the site and by filling out your profile in detail, you can create an easy road map for potential future collaborations and to stay in touch with colleagues.
One drawback is the rather bland activity stream. This means that Academia.edu misses the point of a social network, which is not to flood the individual with all their selected peers' content, but to learn from the user's interaction with the software to highlight content that is of interest to them. Even selecting key areas of research in your profile does nothing to alter the stream.
LinkedIn is a social networking website aimed at professionals. Users can add people as contacts and send them messages, update their personal profiles to notify contacts about their activities, and both recommend and be recommended by contacts for their professional skills. Users can join groups to communicate with others in their field and can ask and answer questions related to their area of work, making LinkedIn potentially useful for academic collaboration. For more details, see the University's guide to LinkedIn.
Google+
Although it is early days, this is a promising new social network with an array of inbuilt features, such as multiple-person video conversations, that may see it challenge Facebook for dominance of the social media landscape.
Mendeley
Not so much a social network, Mendeley is more a useful tool for academic papers, notes and draft work. You can store any text and image-based file in this programme. It has a very similar interface to iTunes, with local storage of information and the ability to synch your library of digital papers across multiple computers. The ability to email multiple papers from this to colleagues is particularly useful.
Researchgate
Researchgate is the social network for scientists, in a similar vein to Academia.edu but without the useful grouping feature to bring individuals from your department together. Also, although you can publish abstracts from papers and journal articles, few do, and you can't download whole articles. But apart from these two drawbacks, it is solid and useable platform.
You can find colleagues by inputting their emails (as in Facebook), create and track conferences (similar to Facebook events), search for conferences, view the speakers and sessions and contact the organisers to request more information. The activity stream is of a higher quality the Academia.edu and can provide more specialised information. The status bar and question functionality is combined, but there is a severe character limit for replies and comments. You can update your profile with awards, grants, societies and journal memberships, find and apply for jobs and recruit staff.
Dropbox
Dropbox is one of several web-based file hosting services, which allow you to access your documents from anywhere and share them easily. It uses cloud computing and is particularly useful for sharing files that are too large to email and for accessing documents when working in different locations.
Dropbox initially allows you up to 2GB of storage for free, but you can gain up to 8GB by referring others to Dropbox.
myExperiment
myExperiment is a social networking site for scientists primarily built around sharing scientific workflows and providing peer review and feedback for these documents. The setup procedure is remarkable simple, requiring only name, email and password, then you can begin delving through the shared stockpile of scientific workflows. You can create a more in depth profile by adding locations, work details and a brief summary of your work, as well as uploading a profile picture.
The key features of myExperiment are:
- Ease of signing up and profile creation
- RSS feed for site announcements
- Facebook style newsfeed
- Small in social networking terms, under 5000 users (as of 09/2011)
- You can create digital versions of your scientific workflow
- Largest public repository of scientific workflow and linked data using tags
- Receive reviews of your workflow and review others' workflows
- Create wish lists of works internal to your documents and distribute among the sites' data packs. This works similar to the Amazon wish list function, allowing you to browse workflows and then decide how to organise them later.
- Create groups with private memberships
- Discussion groups
- View your timeline of interactions to help assess your own development
- Browse other users for potential research collaboration opportunities
Innocentive
Innocentive is a market model of problem solving, which works by offering a cash reward for a solution to your problems. The commercial, government and non-profit aspects focus on engaging with technology as a means of global collaborative problem solving - very much in the spirit of the Bridging the Gaps project, but not necessarily as an academic resource.
The basic procedure is as follows: you create a post detailing a challenge or problem you need a solution for. Your post is labelled in the marketplace along with an appropriate award you decide upon for the solution to your challenge. If you receive no suitable resolutions you keep your reward. You pay one person for their successful solution.
Teleplace
Teleplace is a virtual environment for real world work, functioning like a corporate, streamlined version of Secondlife without the abundant user-created content to distract you. You have a virtual office space and meeting rooms with all the same tools and data of a real office. You have an avatar, although without the level of customisation that Secondlife provides, and apprarently the ability to easily create a custominsed workspace in minutes.
Teleplace allows secure content sharing, instant voting on ideas, document-sharing and scope for collaboration. The key advantage over Secondlife is that it is browser- rather than viewer-based, removing the server and computer compatibility issues that occur with Secondlife.
The training centre with its lecture hall/discussion space and collaborative tools allows for corporate communications which can be broadcast to standalone media, allowing media streams to be integrated into the learning experience.
