Social Media for Higher Education

We use social media all the time, both at school and at home. Our students are social media natives. Yet, do we really know how the use of social media affects the brain and learning? This course looks at research from neuroscience, psychology and education into the effect of social media on learning, and presents a balanced view on how we can use social media safely, based on the evidence we currently have. Teachers will think critically about their use of social media or their aversion to it, and be encouraged to form an informed view on how and why they choose to facilitate learning activities using social media. School leaders, such as year advisors, will develop the skills to implement wise use of social media both in the classroom and out. Teachers will have opportunities to engage in ongoing professional learning via IDEALearning’s online learning management system. Continued discussion and exploratory learning on this topic will be recommended via resources made available in this course, as teachers prepare students for the 21st century whilst being mindful of healthy, balanced ways to live and to learn.

The 6 Components of Omni-Social

A sound Omni-Social strategy includes – at a minimum – these five elements (a lot more detail on these points, including real-world examples, in the Webinar)

- A commitment to moving beyond the hegemony of rented social community
- Admitting that rented social communities offer user experience functionality that customers crave
- Adding some of that functionality (or a reasonable facsimile) to a website or community your brand owns or controls
- Selecting and maintaining a relationship between your rented community (on Facebook, for instance) and your owned assets (robust community functionality on your website, for example)
- Communicating the relationship between your rented and owned community functions to all consumers, to avoid confusion and duplication of purpose
- Giving community members at least partial control of the narrative and dialog inside the owned community. Enable the community to be “theirs” in a way the Facebook page never could be.

This last piece – community member empowerment – is critical to the success of any owned community strategy, regardless of whether it’s part of a larger Omni-Social approach.

Protocols and etiquette of online usage have lagged behind advances in technology

Your work focuses on scholarly identities – can you tell us more about how academics use Twitter and how it might enhance their professional identity?

Like any aspect of identity it’s complex. The promotional narrative of “use social media! It’ll increase your circulation!” has some truth to it, but tends to miss the point or the value that longterm embedded users express…which is that Twitter enables and enriches their engagement and experience as scholars. The boost in audience is a bonus benefit rather than the core.

Social media is becoming a key player in the educational sector. It is redefining the learning landscape in unprecedented ways. Old modes of learning that were once prevalent in the pre-digital era have now surfaced to the fore. Collective and group learning is now achieved through what James Paul Gee called Affinity Spaces or what Wenger et al. dubbed ‘Communities of Practice’. And with the increasing number of teachers and educators taking to social media websites, social networking becomes a central part in teachers professional development. With the upsurge of social media use among educators comes the importance of learning how to effectively use these tools  for educational ends. The infographic below we created a couple of years ago, features 10 of the key social media competencies for teachers. The graphic is entirely based on Doug Johnson’s popular article ‘Top Ten Social Media Competencies for Teachers ’. Check it out and share with your colleagues.

Researchers depend upon their profiles to reflect current and accurate information. In Scopus, your author profile is created through a complex and powerful algorithm, but in combination with a manual curation method. To learn the details behind how this is done, along with ways you can use Scopus to help showcase your research, join our upcoming webinar led by Jessica Kowalski, Direction of Market Development for Scopus and Engineering Village.

Live webinar

Date: Thursday, May 19, 2016

Time: 12:00 a.m. New York/ 6:00 p.m. Amsterdam Main CTA starts

David Matthews examines the approach of ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Mendeley to profit, user data and open access publishing

Here’s the Call for Papers (well, call for Abstracts, initially) for a special issue of Social Media + Society I’m editing with Bjorn Nansen:
Dear colleagues,

Special Issue of Social Media + Society
http://www.sagepub.com/journals/Journal202332

Infancy Online

Eds Tama Leaver (Curtin University) and Bjorn Nansen (University of Melbourne)
 
From the sharing of ultrasound photos on social media onward, the capturing and communicating of babies’ lives online is an increasingly ordinary and common part of everyday digitally mediated life. Online affordances can facilitate the instantaneous sharing and joys of a first smile, first steps and first word spoken to globally distributed networks of family, friends and publics. Equally, from pregnancy tracking apps to baby cameras hidden inside cuddly toys, infants are also subject to an unprecedented intensification of surveillance practices. Reflecting both of these contexts, there is a growing set of questions about the presence, participation and politics of infants in online networks. This special issue seeks to explore these questions in terms of the online spaces in which infants are present; the forms of online participation enabled for and curated on behalf of infants, and the range of political implications raised by infants’ digital data and its traces, for both their present and future lives. Ideally papers will focus on the impact of digital technologies and networked culture on pre-birth, birth and the early years of life, along with related changes and challenges to parenthood and similar domains.

Possible areas of focus include, but are by no means limited to:
•    Social media and infant presence and profiles
•    Cultural and national specificities of infant media use and presence
•    Digital media in the everyday lives of young children
•    The app economy, and capture of infant attention
•    “Mommy blogs,” and online curation
•    Identity and impression management
•    Ethics, persistence and the right to be forgotten
•    Geographies of infant media use
•    Infant interfaces and hardware
•    Cultural responses to parenting, “oversharing”, privacy and surveillance
•    Erasure of maternal bodies in digitising infancy
•    Apps and services targeting infants as a consumer market

Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted to both Tama Leaver t.leaver@curtin.edu.au  and Bjorn Nansen nansenb@unimelb.edu.au  by Friday, 1 April. Where appropriate, please nominate an author for correspondence.

On the basis of these short abstracts, invitations to submit full papers (of no more than 8000 words) will then be sent out by 15 April 2016. Full papers will be due by 1 July 2016, and will undergo the usual Social Media + Society review procedure. Please note that an invitation to submit a full paper for review does not guarantee paper acceptance.