PhD Blog (dot) Net

The postgraduate and early career researchers who have attended the social media sessions I’ve been running with LeRoy Hill over the last year bring with them rich and wide-ranging learning experiences and perspectives.

Some might have been under the impression that we are on some sort of crusade with web 2.0, but we are not. It’s always been about raising awareness of its potential. We recognise that the values of these tools are highly situated in each researcher’s individual practice and disciplinary research culture, and many attendees are rightly apprehensive over the appropriateness and usefulness of social media in their studies and work. We welcome current users who share their social media practices with other attendees, often supporting our enthusiasm with fresh and unique perspectives. But we are equally happy for them to share bad experiences, misconceptions and concerns. This is why we try to encourage an interactive environment and opportunities for discussion.

I can’t speak for LeRoy (though I think he’d agree), but I’m happy for attendees to go away choosing not to adopt any or all of the social media we discuss, as long as the sessions have given them the opportunity to reflect on their own use, or potential use, of these tools, and encouraged them to think critically about their applicability to their own practices and the wider contexts of web 2.0.

This approach also informs and underpins the modes of enquiry and analytical model I am developing for my current PhD work with doctoral students. But what do we mean by critical and reflective practices? Both draw on rich historical and contested models and definitions, which I will not attempt to review here. Rather, I’d like to suggest how these (in my view, often interrelated) practices should be embedded in the processes postgraduate researchers adopt in using social media.

Reflective Practices

• Identifying appropriate web 2.0 resources and services, and evaluating the affordances of specific tools and platforms for academic practice
• Developing self- and collaborative organisational and time-management skills in relation to social media use, including the use of technology-supported strategies
• Identifying appropriate technical know-how and training needs, and using training opportunities (formal and informal), online resources and other sources of support
• Recognising the transferability of web 2.0 skills and digital literacies in lifelong learning, professional development and employability contexts
• Engaging in opportunities for sharing practice and technological skills with peers
• Developing potential for individual, participatory and collaborative action planning and learning design

Critical Practices

• Negotiating new socio-technical academic community and network development and boundary-crossing activities within disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts
• Recognising shifts in academic protocols; new modes and means of production, peer review and knowledge resources
• Adapting to new practices in academic integrity and responsibility; referencing and attribution of digital sources and artefacts
• Identifying inconsistent pedagogies and socio-cultural and political ideologies that underpin social media practice
• Challenging rhetorical representation of social media historically founded in the business metaphor of web 2.0
• Negotiating increasingly blurred boundaries defining institutional, proprietary, freeware and open-source tools and platforms
• Understanding emerging multimedia and multimodal literacies
• Managing online identities and reputation

Tags: academic practice, web 2.0

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 11:27 am and is filed under Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.