Social Media @ Jubilee Graduate Centre – Session One
Yesterday, me and LeRoy Hill ran the first of our sessions on social media at the Jubilee Graduate Centre. We had an interesting mix of PhD students and Early Career Researchers attending from a range of Schools across the University who were very supportive and enthusiastic about using social media in their studies and research. We did run over schedule, particularly as we wanted to engage with the audience and encourage group discussion, though we would like to have had even more time for this. The general feedback from attendees was that they would appreciate more interaction and would be happy for longer sessions if necessary. It was always going to be a struggle fitting everything into three short sessions and we will keep this in mind should we be running these again in the future.
Meanwhile, much of the planning for the second session has been done though we have over two weeks for fine tuning. We are intending to cover blogging, Twitter, content sharing sites and social bookmarking, as well as aggregation and syndication systems. It’s going to be tough to fit so much in if we hope to integrate further opportunities for discussion and interaction!
We also launched the online resource which supports the sessions. This was a key component in our initial proposal particularly as the limited time of the sessions was always going to restrict opportunities to demonstrate specific tools. In addition to the annotated links to key social media we have included a useful selection of tutorials, guides and articles with an emphasis on academic practice. This resource will remain active after the duration of the sessions, and we are hoping it will – along with the sessions – provide a basis for further development in this area.
Tags: leroy hill, research training, sm@jgc, web 2.0
January 20th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
Andy, your agenda definitely seems packed. You might want to do what George Siemans did for his first connectivism online conference. He put up a powerpoint presentation BEFORE the conference with basic information he wanted to cover in the conference. The discussions then focused on those areas that participants were interested in going more indepth on. Why not put your powerpoint up first, so then you’ll have time to focus on issues your participants are interested in, but still getting some of the basics up there for those who may have no or limited background on the topic?
January 20th, 2010 at 11:49 pm
Thanks for the suggestion Virginia – it’s an interesting approach, particularly with our emphasis on participation and openness. We did invite attendees to use our Twitter hashtag #smjgc1 to post their thoughts about social media – which a few did.
We are also looking into funding opportunities to develop the sessions further, including workshop-based training, and physical and online platforms to share good practice.
January 27th, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Yep, AMBITIOUS!
I have a small nit to pick. Web 1.0 was not about “read-only” in fact the dawn of the www opened up read/reply/write — it was just a bit harder and limited. Web 2.0 built on this, but it was not “new.”
I would also argue your conclusion Web 1–> content , Web 2 –> people. My sense is that the relationships between content and people is more prominent in Web 2, but that the early online communities of “web 1” were totally about people.
Just 2 cents from an old fart!
Waving
Nancy
January 28th, 2010 at 9:20 am
Nancy, thanks for the comments. I agree, Web 2.0 is a useful but misleading catch-all. However, I think the online communities in the so called ‘web 1’ included many early adopters and constituted only a part of the total users which eventually emerged as the web reached a mass audience. Many later adopters (to which I certainly include myself) encountered the web for the first time as largely passive and – in a web-wise sense – culturally-uninformed users, and for many of these, social media have provided genuine opportunities for participation and social interaction.
January 28th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Interesting. So you are talking about “US” as participants on the web. In general, the majority of users in Web 1 didn’t know/didn’t choose / could not participate in the interactive nature that was emerging. In Web 2.0 more of us do. Part of this is the evolution of the technology, part of it is evolution of our conceptions of ourselves as players in this big online game we call the WWW!
March 23rd, 2010 at 12:03 am
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