I’m just off to the Engineering and Science Graduate Centre to run a social media training session for the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (Midlands and Oxford). Here’s the slides:
Earlier today, Leroy Hill and I ran the latest in our social media sessions; our first at the Arts Graduate Centre.
The sessions are designed to integrate a range of interrelated key concepts (e.g. networking, digital identities), underlying processes (e.g. folksonomy, aggregation), and tools / media (twitter, blogs etc.), with the hope that personal and disciplinary perspectives, and wider socio-cultural and political contexts will emerge.
Today’s attendees – a mix of doctoral and masters degree students, primarily from the arts and humanities – didn’t let us down, demonstrating thoughtful, reflective and critical approaches to adopting and using social media in their practices.
Within our structured programme of presentations, we try to adopt a flexible approach to encourage an informal and interactive environment, and today, it’s refreshing to note that by the time the two sections we had factored-in for group discussion came around, the attendees had already brought up many of the key issues we were planning to introduce. Key concerns raised during the session included the usual suspects:
We hope all the attendees found the session as useful and rewarding as we did, and we look forward to seeing them again on November 24th.
Next month I’ll be back at the Jubilee Graduate Centre (JGC) with LeRoy Hill to run a new round of social media sessions for the new academic term. The original series of three lunchtime sessions earlier in the year attracted a great group of enthusiastic, multi-disciplinary PhD students and early career researchers, and led on to a further single all-day session at the Engineering Graduate Centre, and a presentation and paper (forthcoming) at the Future Learningscapes e-learning conference with JGC manager Tracy Sisson. (We also have a couple of sessions lined up at the Arts Graduate Centre, but that’s for another post).
This time round, we’re presenting two longer sessions at the JGC. We have limited preparation time, so we won’t be diverting too far from the original format; combining presentation, discussion, and the opportunity for quick demos – and we are updating our online resource which support the sessions to encourage further exploration of the social media we are discussing. Our key aims remain to raise awareness of the potential of using social media in academic and research work, and provide an opportunity for dissuasion and sharing of best practices. But I hope the new sessions will also indicate both my and LeRoy’s evolving thought processes and perspectives from our individual doctoral research projects and our own personal and reflective use of social media.
Following on from our successful lunchtime sessions at the Jubilee Graduate Centre earlier this year, me and LeRoy are repeating our Graduate training in social media at the Engineering Graduate Centre (EGC) on Thursday 17 June. This time we are conducting a single, full-day session (10 till 4), which will incorporate all the presentational elements from the Jubilee sessions whilst allowing, we hope, greater opportunities for interaction and discussion from the attendees (as suggested in our Jubilee feedback). As this will be the first time we have delivered a session on the main campus, it is being co-funded by all four main campus Graduate Centres. Whilst the session is open to all Postgraduate students and Early Career Researchers across the University, the venue may attract a strong representative from the Engineering faculty, and EGC manager Rebecca Dowsett has suggested incorporating more ‘hands-on’ approaches might be appreciated. Whilst we will be demonstrating a number of key social media during the sessions, time limitations restrict any formal workshop component, but we hope there will be opportunities to ‘break-out’ from the session room and use the Centre PCs for additional demos during breaks and lunch.
A week on from attending the excellent Digital Researcher event run by Vitae and the British Library, it’s been interesting to see how some attendees have followed up with their online activity; developing networks and continuing discussions, partly driven by Tristram Hooley and Alan Cann, two of the presenters at the event. The #dr10 hashtag key has been evident on Twitter, FriendFeed and a number of blogs.
Open online course models, such as George Siemens’ and Stephen Downes’ Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08 and CCK09) may partly rely on traditional ‘bounded’ online platforms (such as their Moodle site), but actively encourage participants to use their own existing social media (blogs, wikis and social bookmarking sites etc.) for personal reflection, social engagement and content management, as well as creating new groups and platforms for further discussion and knowledge sharing. The use of a unifying hashtag seems at present, the most effective way of aggregating this type of distributed activity.
But how effective is this in sustaining interest and participation? By adopting and encouraging an open, distributed model like this, it is necessary to accept that the resulting activities can be exciting, unpredictable, imperfect, messy or just plain non-eventful.
Attendees at events like Digital Researcher can vary considerably in their awareness, knowledge and competences of the technologies being introduced, and in their motivations to use them (like it or not, some PhD students DO attend training courses just to tick off another skill-set for their annual reviews). The excitement and good intentions which some may take home with them can be soon forgotten in the subsequent days and weeks, as busy schedules and deadlines take over. In addition, people trying social media for the first time often ‘don’t get the point’ of them because their affordances only become evident once a level of maturity is attained.
In the recent sessions I ran with LeRoy Hill at the University of Nottingham, we adopted similar methods of presentation and discussion to those which featured at the Digital Researcher event (albeit on a far less ambitious scale). Though we’ve not conducted any formal evaluation as yet, anecdotal evidence would suggest that the take up of these tools in the subsequent weeks that have followed has been patchy at best. Reflecting on our sessions, we identified that whilst such initiatives can raise awareness, the need to scaffold them with ongoing support such as drop-in open workshops and online discussion groups becomes apparent.
Tristram Hooley rightly points out that students were best supported at Digital Researcher by actively working with each other, sharing personal perspectives and good practice. Arguably, follow-up activities can be scaffolded in similar ways. However, whilst the initial focus can be on the event itself, and within the core group of attendees who are keen to continue participating, that motivation will soon dissipate, as the event and the group become increasingly irrelevant to individual research practices, disciplines and communities. How do we make the transition?
We had another great turn out for our third and final social media session at Jubilee Graduate Centre last week. We are now looking into taking this to the main campus, though we might consider merging the three sessions into a single all-day event. This may allow time for lengthier and more interactive discussion activities.
Last Friday, we continued our series of sessions in social media at the Jubilee Graduate Centre. Nineteen PhD and Early Career Researchers attended and kept us on our toes throughout with interesting comments and questions. The response and feedback was terrific, and I look forward to seeing many of them back for the final session on 17 February. Here’s the presentation for Session Two:
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.
Early next year, I’m running a short series of sessions with my colleague LeRoy Hill on social media for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers based at Jubilee Campus. The Jubilee Graduate Centre is hosting the sessions and providing facilities and refreshments. Centre Manager Tracy Sisson is enthusiastic about the project and has been very helpful in organising everything.
We’ve just started publicising the three sessions and hopefully we can get enough interest to fill the 20 places we are allowing for each one. We want the sessions to be informal and quite interactive, and it would be nice to get a mix of attendees from the Schools of Education, Computer Science and Business – could provide an interesting range of perspectives.
We are busy designing the sessions and compiling a complimentary online resource with links to tools, tutorials, and and other useful references – lots to do each side of Christmas.
All sessions take place in B14 from 12 noon to 1.30pm on the following days:
Session One: Monday 18 January 2010
Introductory session providing an overview of social media and a discussion of their underlying concepts, values and technologies.
Session Two: Friday 5 February 2010
A focus on blogging and microblogging, the sharing of resources such as texts, presentations, images and video, and forms of tagging and aggregation.
Session Three: Wednesday 17 February 2010
A focus on social networking, bookmarking and collaboration through social networking sites, wikis, and other participatory tools.
Anyone wishing to attend should contact Tracy at jubilee-graduate-centre@nottingham.ac.uk
