PhD Blog (dot) Net

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.

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.

During the second of our social media sessions at the Jubilee Graduate Centre, I mentioned that I had recently responded to a tweet from one of my followees on Twitter. He posted a link to an article he was desperate to read but unable to access as his University wasn’t subscribed to that particular journal. I quickly found out I had access to the article through my University of Nottingham account, and uploaded it to GoogleDocs for him to pick up. For all I know, others may have responded in the same way.

Interestingly, the response to this in the session was mixed. Most I’m sure, appreciated the time and effort I saved this guy; the inter-library loan service is an invaluable yet often frustratingly time-consuming provision which many of us rely on. I used the opportunity to emphasise the expectation of reciprocity in social media interactions; that I would hope others would do the same thing for me. Perhaps the uneasiness evident in some of the responses was a natural reaction to the way this small, virtually insignificant act represents one of the ways social media challenges traditional channels of academic access to knowledge. And the recognition that we all influence, and depend on, the complex socio-economic structures that bind Higher Education and academic publishing.

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