In recent years, we have seen an explosion of social media activity within the university. In some ways, this isn’t a surprise, with students leading the way in social media becoming a ubiquitous part of everyday life. It’s also not a surprise that this has led universities to increasingly see social media as an important part of their recruitment and engagement, leading to widespread use in communications and student affairs. What is perhaps more surprising is how faculty have taken to social media, both to talk among themselves and to engage with wider publics beyond the academy.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
So you want to be a publicly engaged academic? It’s an exciting time for doing public social science but to make it work you have to avoid the trap of the impact machine and the social media machine. Don’t get caught in their tendrils! This board game charts your progress towards your ambition, […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
My notes on Kerry Shephard, Kim Brown, Tess Guiney, Lynley Deaker & Gala Hesson (2018): Exploring the use of social media by community-engaged university people, Innovations in Education and Teaching International. This paper considers social media in terms of the third mission of the university, contextualising it in terms of the difficulties which […]
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
I’m (re)reading this important paper by Tressie McMillan Cottom in advance of a talk which Karen Lumsden and I are doing tomorrow on the dark side of (digital) public engagement. We were asked to suggest a reading for the session and this immediately occurred as the most suitable. It’s a insightful, careful […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
I was really excited to come across these two important initiatives concerning social media use in higher education. Firstly, Laura Pasquini is organising a series of Twitter chats about Higher Education Digital Identity (#HEdigID): Secondly, Bonnie Stewart and Natalie Delia Deckard are running an EdX course on Engagement in a Time of Polarization: How […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
This is a really important post by Eric Grollman that has helped me rethink a part of Social Media for Academics that I was struggling with. The systematic generation of imposter syndrome within the academy is a crucial mechanism through which the costs involved in digital engagement come to be distributed […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
