Using social media to enhance your research and professional development

Editor's Notes

• #4: 13:30 What are your favourite work and non-work websites? How do you find information on the web? I set this task for you over lunch. What did you find? What are the key features of a good/useful website? Did you find out about any new resources you are going to look up?
• #5: 13:35 Printing press (invented in 1440 ) – 1 st scholarly journals, allowed the easy communication of scientific discoveries. Authorship became profitable/ meaningful. Authors had the power. Changed how people wrote and read (from oral readings to silent private readings). Development of copyright laws to protect the notion of intellectual knowledge. In the industrial revolution Newspapers became possible, news was quick and widespread. Large scale broadcast media. TV, phones, faxes, video, radio, photocopying, global travel, etc. More input from the receiver of information but media producers still hold the power. Currently, we are in the ‘beginnings’ of the digital age. And just as it would have been impossible in 1440 to predict the impact upon society of the printing press and later the impact of electricity, we are still yet to live through most of the changes in society that will occur during this digital age. Until the end of the twentieth century, only a relatively small and wealthy fraction of the human race could broadcast television programs, publish newspapers, create encyclopaedias; by the twenty first century, however, inexpensive digital computers and widespread Internet access in the Western world made the means of high quality media production and distribution accessible to a substantial portion of the world's population. The power of knowledge is shifting because everyone can now create, publish, broadcast, connect, share and search.
• #6: Video
• #7: Very short overview of each tool
• #10: Cristina Mendes Da Costa is a researcher who has gone down the personal route for her blog and website. She has successfully integrated her personal and professional profiles and is well known in the digital world.
• #11: Andrew Gray is Curator of Hepatology at the Manchester Museum. He is passionate about his research on a specific species of frog and has developed this frogblog all about this research area. He has a fabulous reputation through his work on the blog and his public engagement activities so this is a great example of a successful research area blog
• #12: The what’s up doc blog is a really good example of a collective blog where PGRs can post about anything they like. It has developed a great sense of community and has many active and passive bloggers.
• #13: How many hrs do you spend trawling the literature? Think about automatic downloads and e-libraries – share them with your research team Search tags so that you will be alerted to papers coming out in your research areas citeulike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references 4,816,166 articles - 3,019 added today. Easily store references you find online so you can access them from anywhere Discover new articles and resources Automated article recommendations NEW Share references with your peers Find out who's reading what you're reading Store and search your PDFs Links to endnote and refman
• #15: LinkedIn highlights the growing importance of networking in today’s world As research becomes even more multidisciplinary and global, collaboration is becoming more important, and social networking in the academic community can present leads and collaboration opportunities that you might never have found by other means. Social networking as a tool to enhance one’s career has proved popular in almost all sectors
• #16: Example of a LinkedIn profile. I’m part of the UKRSA and PhD careers outside academia groups.
• #17: Lots of examples.
• #18: Great for grant, paper writing etc Gets rid of the problem of incorporating everyone’s amendments into one document Reduced functionality compared to Microsoft
• #19: So many tools out there that you could use. You need to figure out what is worth investing time in and how you will gain. Some tools will show an immediate return but others need a longer term investment before you will se a return.
• #20: It can be difficult to navigate the crowd of information to find networks or individuals who are useful for you and your research. RSS feeds help to filter the incoming information for you.
• #21: This is the RSS symbol, you will see it on nearly all websites.
• #22: RSS allows you to subscribe to that information. That means you can choose which information you are interested in and it will come to you rather than you having to actively look for it. RSS generally gives you headline information then you can choose whether it is important enough for you to find out more.
• #23: One way of receiving information by RSS is via iGoogle. You can create a Google search page which has all the headline information you want on it. My iGoogle homepage covers some items about researcher development and also my personal interest items. You can have more than 1 tab. Other examples of RSS readers include Google reader, bloglines, and browser software have their own RSS lists that work like favourites.
• #24: A digital identity is how you and others see you on the web. This can be through static pages or web 2.0 sites and tools. Like it or not, we all have a digital identity. What you want to do is have control over what you and others see as your digital identity. As research becomes even more global, multidisciplinary and collaborative, you will benefit from having a more visible digital identity.
• #25: A good way of seeing the extent of your current digital identity is to search for yourself. This is what I get when I Google myself, (comment on content).
• #26: Task using the sites listed search for yourself. What did you find? Are you happy with it? Is it up to date? Does it showcase you and your research? Is is personal or professional? Could it be improved (if so how?), Pleased…disappointed…worried!? The more you engage with digital technology, the more power you will have over your digital identity
• #27: 14:00 Consider how you are viewed and assessed by others around you in the research world. These activities are probably the main way other researchers and academics know who you are and what you do. Is there anything you want to add to this list?
• #28: In this model we have four stages (identification, creation, quality assurance and dissemination) which are underpinned by a variety of social interactions and forms of collaboration. Collaboration is defined broadly here to include the work of all the people who might be involved in research including researchers, librarians, funders and the general public. Each stage is important to the research community’s ability to produce knowledge and learn from the work of others. Social tools have the potential to contribute something to each of these stages. But they also have the potential to challenge the ways in which research is done. What activities do you undertake in your own research cycle? What activities do you undertake outside of your research? What tools do you use now? How could social media help you?
• #29: 14:15 A word of warning...
• #30: Have you got any tips to share?
• #31: 14:20 Here are a few activities we brainstormed around researcher roles. They are broken them down into 4 main roles. We then listed some of the activities you would undertake to fulfil these roles and some tools you might use to complete each activity. Have a think about this diagram and design your own strategy for developing a digital profile that works for you. Take into account: what you found out about your current digital identity your network and how you would like it to grow your academic activities and research cycle the tools you have found useful or want to find out more about what are you going to do it the next week, next month and next 3 months to develop your profile?