140 Characters is the New Black: The Road Ahead
In part 1 of “140 Characters is the New Black”, I briefly outlined why academics have largely been resistant to giving social media the +1 it so rightly deserves, citing both Nicholas Kristof’s article and some of my own (non-empirically tested) hypotheses. In part 2, I offered a quick glimpse into three channels (Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube) and how to get a decent handle on them.
Now I’ll offer my version of the road ahead: how do we incentivise academics and researchers to engage in social media, how do we help them help themselves, and what are the overall net benefits?
My Utopia
Entering the academic world you are guaranteed three things:
1. You will teach
2. You will research
3. You will attend conferences
And what do you know? Social media fits like a Chi-Square (as in, fits good).
1. You will teach:
Twitter has you covered! Here you can even read about 50 different ways of using Twitter in the classroom. (Read this one for a laugh). In 2009, Dr. Rank (professor of History at UT Dallas) tried a class Twitter experiment, allowing students to contribute to discussion through tweeting questions and comments - prompting more than just the regulars to engage with the subject material.
Right here at the University of Melbourne, Dr. Mike Pottenger (Statistics & Political Economy lecturer) has utilised Twitter’s capabilities by allowing students to tweet questions through a subject-specific #hashtag.
If that’s not incentive enough, here’s the P-bomb: Promotion. As a staff member there are four areas for promotion, two of which are ‘Contribution to teaching & learning’ and ‘Engagement’. As mentioned by Professor Sophie Arkoudis at the Academic Staff Orientation, students enjoy “being taught by people who have attempted to be at the cutting edge in their fields”. Social media can be that cutting edge – that innovation. And sure, by definition, innovation is risky - but it may pay off. Teaching is probably the most difficult area of promotion to prove, so why not use social media as a quantifiable tool to highlight your students’ active engagement? (an example: number of twitter questions asked and engaged with). Go on, throw it a like.
2. You will research:
Have an idea? Why not blog it? Emerging research has found that longer, well-crafted blog-posts are getting mass attention! Developing an idea through blogging can not only increase your world-wide reputation, it may open up the floodgates to a brand new audience willing to actively engage with your material. Social media knows no geographical bounds!
How do you get the word out? Why not tweet it? Twitter will allow you to share your ideas, questions and blog-posts, and collaborate with like-minded academics. While LSE has some good tips, I think it’s invaluable to hear it right out of the Twitter-birds’ mouth: Researcher, Deborah Lupton summarises her experiences “Social media for academia: some things I have learnt”.
And once again, the third area of promotion is “Research”. If social media can help you research better, faster and more efficiently, why not hand it a favourite?
Blogging, answering those tough philosophical questions of our time.
3. You will attend conferences:
Conferences aren’t just about catering. They are a battle of ideas. An opportunity to meet, collaborate, argue, explore and learn. And guess what, most of them are Twitter-friendly. I can almost guarantee that your next conference will have its own #hashtag - make sure you tweet along!
Twitter can be your common ground; an opportunity to see who else is connected. Your favourite academic? Great! Throw them a follow, flick them a tweet and build your relationship. Chances are they’re Twitter-enthusiasts, so get into the Twitter-space early!
Academic conference live-tweeting is most definitely a thing. Here are some tips. Replace your notepad with your Twitter dashboard and kill a few Twitter-Birds with one stone: actively engage with conference material, meet new faces (take it to the face-to-face level!), and build an archive to re-visit later. Say #yes at your next conference.
Everyone’s doing it #tweeptweep Even Glyn!
So what can #ResBaz do to help engage academics in social media? Well, a number of things:
Keep writing blog-posts: practice what you preach and make a splash!
Produce some sort of guide/document: helps to legitimise the University’s enthusiasm about social media with academia.
Find collaborations: central University of Melbourne Social Media is definitely a great start! (Interested in helping? Shoot me a tweet!)
Find the champions: those academics who have already embraced the wonders of social media. (Again, please do tweet me)
Run a workshop! Show them how it’s done with some active participation. But make sure to invite some champions. As Nicholas Kristof argues, academics are trained to strictly communicate with one another and their superiors. So surely they’ll listen to each other too!?
Build a community: encourage & empower your social media literate academics to share the enthusiasm by tweeting, blogging, and vlogging. This will hopefully create a ripple effect and get more academics on board.
Never forget: social media should only be used as a tool, not a proxy, for real life interaction.
The final question: Who benefits? Apart from the academics? We all do.
Getting academics on board will help legitimise social media as a professional tool with the potential of producing world-class, life-changing, revolutionary research. The possibilities, the collaborations, the ideas are endless.
Nicholas Kristof made a very important, and quite daunting, comment: Academics are reproducing a culture of exclusivity through continually writing and publishing for each other and their superiors, rather than the public. Perhaps social media can change that. Through entertaining ideas in the open, being restricted to 140 characters, actively engaging with communities and individuals previously unreachable, finding new collaborations and traces of understanding, perhaps we begin to step a little closer to a more common intellectual good. A place of open knowledge. Research by the people, for the people.
That’s what I call revolutionary.
Interested in potentially collaborating, being a champion or attending the workshop? Please fill this out! Would love to hear from you.
