LinkedIn

, , , ,

Steal this: Student Guide to Social Media

, , , ,

If you click the image below, you'll be taken to the Student Guide to Social Media. This is an interactive online resource, giving information on various social media platforms, and on tasks you can accomplish using social media - it is aimed primarily at undergraduates but has applications across the board. It is made available under a BY-NC-ND Creative Commons licence: in other words if you think this resource might be of use to YOUR students, feel free to use this, link to this, make it part of your own institution's website, just as long as you credit the creators (the BY part), aren't using it for commercial purposes (the NC part) and use it entirely as it is, in its current state, rather than creating your own version or derivatives (the ND part).

A screenshot of the resource's homepage

 

Alternatively, book mark libassets.manchester.ac.uk/social-media-guide/ or click the link to open the resource in a new window.

A Northern collaboration

The resource is the result of a joint project between the Libraries of the Universities of Leeds, Manchester and York, developed over the Summer. Michelle Schneider from Leeds' very successful Skills@Library team approached me about working together on a social media resource for undergraduates - I was extremely pleased she did, because it was something on my list to do anyway.

There's a lot of support out there for postgrads, academics, researchers generally in using social media, but I don't think there's as much for undergraduates. It's an area we're looking to expand at my own institution, and as well as face-to-face workshops I really wanted something that worked as an interactive learning object online, probably made using Articulate / Storyline. Imagine how pleased I was, therefore, when Michelle told me the other collaborators would be Manchester, including Jade Kelsall, who is absolutely brilliant with Articulate! I'd worked with Jade before at Leeds; she provided all the technical expertise to create the Digitisation Toolkit (using the Articulate), one of the parts of the LIFE-Share project I actually enjoyed. Also on the team were Carla Harwood at Leeds, and Sam Aston at Manchester.

So we got together, brainstormed on lots of massive pieces of paper, photographed the paper with our ipads, emailed each other a lot, and came up with a resource which we think will be really useful. I feel quite bad because I was off on paternity leave for a month of this and it took me ages to get back up to speed, so I don't feel like I contributed enough compared to Jade and Michelle who worked tirelessly on this (sorry guys!) but I'm really pleased with the result. It's gone down very well on Twitter, and I was excited to see we've found our way onto a curriculum already:

 

 

How it works

Increasingly as I do more and more teaching, training, and planning, I'm aware that when introducing people to new tools (or trying to help people use existing tools better) you have to give them two different versions of the same core information. The first and obvious thing is how to use a tool - e.g. here's Twitter, here's how you create an account, here's some tips on using it. But this assumes some prior knowledge - what if you don't know why you'd need Twitter? So you also have to present the information in terms of tasks people want to achieve: "I want to boost my professional reputation" is one such task, and Twitter would be among the tools you might recommend to achieve this. The great thing about using Storyline is we can do exactly that - students can explore this resource by tool, or by task, or both.

We've also included case studies (some video, some not) and I'm indebted to my colleague in the Career's Service at York, Chris Millson, for providing a lot of really useful information about both tools and tasks and sourcing case studies...

The resource is, deliberately, very straightforward. We stripped out everything non-essential to give students easily digestible, bite-sized introductions to the various things they might want to use these tools for (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare, Google+, Academia.edu, blogs etc). It's also relatively informal without attempting to be in any way cool or streetwise. I've showed it to some of my students in info skills classes already and it's gone down very positively; I think even students who are very au fait with web 2.0 tools still appreciate some guidance on how to meld the social with the academic and the professional.

So, check out the Students Guide to Social Media, tell us what you think, and if you'd like to steal it, feel free.

 

 

, , , ,

Becoming a Networked Researcher: a suite useful of presentations

, , , ,

Web 2.0 tools have finally moved firmly beyond the 'potential fad' stage, to gaining widespread acceptance as valuable weapons in the Researcher's arsenal. Statistics about social media are almost meaningless because a: there's so many of them and b: the information becomes outdated quickly, but at the time of writing it's thought that around 70% of academics use social media for personal use, and in my view we've most definitely reached the tipping point where social media's utility for professional use is properly understood. This is directly linked to the 'impact agenda' - the research shows that blogging about and tweeting about research results in more citations for that research, and pretty much everyone wants more citations. But becoming a networked researcher is about more than the REF-related bottom line, it's about being part of a mutually beneficial, supportive, and intellectually engaging community.

With all that in mind, I ran a suite of hands-on workshops at my institution, the University of York, on behalf of the Researcher Development Team. The suite was entitled 'Becoming a Networked Researcher' and it covered firstly blogs and blogging, then collaboration and dissemination, and finally Twitter. Rather than divide these up into three blog posts I thought the most useful thing to do would be to have them all here - so below you'll find various links to, or embedded versions of, presentations and handouts for the course. I've tried to make it so they work without me there to talk over the top of them...

The workshops themselves were really enjoyable and the researchers themselves very enthusiastic and engaged - a whole bunch of blogs and twitter accounts have already sprang up since they ran!  But I'd like to improve them for next time around (we'll be running them twice a year from now on); whether you're a Masters / PhD researcher, an academic, or an information professional reading this, I'd be interested in your views on how useful these materials are, and any advice or tips or, particularly, examples, I should be referring to in future sessions.

The workshop materials

The three parts of the suite were designed to work together and separately - if you're only interested in one aspect of becoming a networked researcher, you don't need to look at the materials from the other sessions.

Part 1: Blogs and Blogging

Blogs and Blogging was the most successful session. The advice here is slightly York-centric in that we all have Google accounts, so we all automatically have Blogger blogs; if you're reading this at another insitution it's definitely worth considering Wordpress.com as your blogging platform. Better still, Wordpress.org, although that requires some technical knowledge.

Here's the Prezi presentation:

And here's the handout which goes with it:

Blogs for researchers: workshop handout by University of York Information

 

Part 2: Dissemination and Collaboration

I've decided against embedding the materials for this one - there was a lot more group and collaborative work and the session was slightly shorter, so my presentation doesn't cover as much ground. But you can view the Dissemination and Collaboration Prezi here (the handout doesn't really add anything); it covers LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Prezi itself, and Slideshare.

Interestingly, I really struggled to convince people as to the value of LinkedIn. I'm suspect of the value of LinkedIn myself, but I've heard countless researchers talk about how important it is, so I flagged it up as a key resource anyway...

 

Part 3: Twitter for Researchers

I really enjoyed this as I think Twitter is such a vital tool for modern scholarship and communication - you can see the Slides from the session here:

 

And the handout is here:

Twitter for academics: workshop handout by University of York Information

Any questions, comments or queries, leave them below.

,

a couple of articles up on the website, some frippery, and LinkedIn

,

A real mish-mash of miscellany, this blog post; all sorts of little things to report. Firstly, as part of a general improvement on the content of my website, I’ve added some stuff about the New Professionals Conference, CILIP Graduate Day, some CILIP Copyright Courses and HERON digitisation conferences to the Events page, and a couple of articles to the Papers & Presentations page.

The first is something which I’ve been meaning to add for ages – a PDF of my first ever publication, way back in 2006 when I was a fresh-faced young library person (literally fresh-faced – seeing the article again I was shocked to see it had the same picture of me as I have up on my site. I really must update the latter to show me gnarled and old as I am today). It is for the 2006/07 edition of Propsects’ (the careers organisation) Postgrad magazine, and all about how I worked during my first MA, the importance of getting work-experience as well as a qualification, and that sort of thing – little did I know that about a month later, I’d get a different job in the library and eventually conclude I needed to embark upon yet more post-graduate study to get an MSc as well. The article can be found at the bottom of the Papers page on my site.

The second article is about the Library Routes Project, as a sort of companion piece to Woodsiegirl’s Gazette article. It centres around this idea of whether anyone wanting to grow up working in libraries would find the job anything like they imagined it when they were kids, or whether the fast changing face of modern librarianship would have rendered it fairly unrecognisable in the interim period. It’s the top article on the Papers page. Thank you to Joel Kerry for inviting me to write it.

Also on the subject of adding, there’s been a Frippery page on my blog for a short while which I’ve not got around to telling anyone about yet – its purpose is to provide an outlet for stuff I want to say but which I’d feel guilty clogging up the syndicated feed with, so if anyone wants to read some Info-Pro related frippery they can do so by clicking the link in the Other Pages on the Blog section on the right of the blog's homepage or, because I want to cater for your every need, by clicking here. The current month’s post is about the absolutely crazy-hard job-at-Google Interview questions which were in the press recently, and what the library equivalents might be…

And finally, LinkedIn. Can anyone tell me a bit more about what’s going on there? Whenever you type an Information Professional’s name into Google, their LinkedIn profile always seems to be right near the top. It’s obviously a popular site, with good search-engine rankings, and lots of Info Pros signing up to it. But it looks fairly rubbish (as in, aesthetically it’s not up to the standards you might expect), and I’m not sure exactly what it is for. Is it a sort of purely professional social networking thing? Well okay I do know that’s basically what it is, but has anyone got anything positive out of it? I’d love to know more.

That's it for now!

- thewikiman