Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Postgraduate
Participation
active users of social media produce large amounts of content every day such as writing analyses and comments, sharing bibliographic data or posting datasets creative commons agreements foster the gift-economy online as well as academic publishers and other creators of content
Virtual Community
Each platform offers different functionality and has its own culture, which is largely the product of its most active participants
cultures grow and change in response to how participants use the service (Facebook is social, Twitter informational, LinkedIn professional, etc.)
create forums for learning and collaborating not bounded by time, place and/or funding
enable users to filter, recommend and comment on quality (social bookmarking and citation) offer public and private spaces for themed discussions (wikis)
Communication Services
Blogging: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress Microblogging: Twitter, Yammer, Google Buzz
Collaboration Services
Conferencing: Adobe Connect, GoToMeeting, Skype Social bookmarking: Delicious, Diigo, BibSonomy CiteULike, Mendeley Social news: Digg, Reddit, Newsvine
Collaboration Services
Social bibliography: CiteULike, Mendeley Social documents: Google Docs, Dropbox, Zoho Project management: Bamboo, Basecamp, Huddle
Social Bookmarking
Tools to search, organize, store, tag and share vast amounts of information and aggregate the collective recommendations of a disciplinary community.
Folksonomies
collection of tags distinguished from the conventionally ordered, official and hierarchical taxonomies of information dynamic and highly flexible, created as you go in a way that suits a particular purpose users can define tags specific to their needs and see how other users cross-file information under multiple tags leading to serendipitous discovery of links they would not otherwise have seen
Multimedia Services
Photographs: Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug Video: Viddler, Vimeo, YouTube
Networks
Networks of people with similar interests help you identify valuable resources and information. How you use them will depend on you, your discipline, those around you and the research you are doing. Theres value in weak ties.
Graduate Junction is a social networking service aimed at postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers.
MethodSpace is a social network service for social scientists run by the publisher Sage. Nature Network is a science-focused social network service run by Nature Publishing Group.
Search
Unlike traditional search technologies that return results based on algorithms and search history, social tools provide alternative approaches to questions based on intelligently-filtered information that helps to stimulate new questions, in the same way that a conversation with a colleague might.
Risks
moving findings into the public domain before they are ready can endanger your ability to publish and potentially provide people with ammunition that they can use against you. The trick is finding a balance between openness and disclosure and of building positive relationships with your collaborators. privacy and copyright related issues
Benefits
tools to filter, share, learn, recommend and review building important networks for feedback, collaboration and publication
Criticism
Some academics fear that the quality of public and academic discussion and debate is being undermined, and the ubiquitous use of the Internet and digital technologies like smartphones are potentially damaging to our thinking, our culture and our society in general.
Growth of Technology
encroachment of technology into every aspect of life has potentially damaging implications technology moves faster than educators and policy makers
Privacy
culture of active personal and professional disclosure changes the interface between public and private spaces and misuse of data employer requests for access to personal passwords and activity
Banality
Small bits of information such as status updates and sharing of links have led to the charge that social media are trivial in nature and suitable only for entertainment rather than professional research.
Peripheral
Some researchers believe that social media are still peripheral in research, and this leads some to argue that it is therefore not worth engaging.
Personalization
Personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy.
Information overload
Social media have dramatically increased the amount of publiclyavailable information.
Work/Life Balance
Social media have the potential to extend your working day and blur the distinction between work and private life. People need to think carefully about boundaries, particularly if they are using mobile devices.
Identification of Knowledge
enhances research capacity and saves time harnesses networks to discover and filter knowledge enables participation in seminars and conferences via podcasts, etc. (literature/peer reviews)
Creation of Knowledge
provides more effective collaboration and immediate feedback raises the profile of your work more rapidly than conventional academic publishing encourages research groups to work together across departmental, institutional and national boundaries
Dissemination of knowledge
Disseminate your research more widely and effectively: consider the tone for publication of scholarly ideas via social media consider the audience (The Head of Department, your peers, your research subjects and the general public may all read what you write)
consider the intellectual property and copyright implications of making your ideas and results available via social media?
References
Alan Cann of the Department of Biology at the University of Leicester Konstantia Dimitriou and Tristram Hooley of the International Centre for Guidance Studies