This document discusses using social media for learning and professional development in academia. It explores how academics interact online, how to prepare for participating in online conversations, and which platforms are best suited for sharing work or conversing. The document encourages experimenting on conversing platforms like Twitter to improve communication skills before applying those skills to more permanent sharing platforms. It provides tips for building connections and maintaining an online presence through low-commitment activities like following lists of interest and participating in weekly chats.

1. Using Social Media for Learning and
Professionalization
November 27, 2014

2. How and why do academics
interact?
What are the results of those
interactions?
Which interactions result in
productive conversations?

3. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you
arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged
in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to
pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the
discussion had already begun long before any of them got
there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all
the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until
you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument;
then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him;
another comes to your defense; another aligns himself
against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of
your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's
assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The
hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with
the discussion still vigorously in progress.
--Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1941

4. Avenues of Access
Burke characterizes participation in the conversation as open.

5. Avenues of Access
For academics entering 70 years later, the open parlor
becomes more akin to an endurance course.

6. How do you prepare
for becoming active
in the conversation?

7. Who is qualified to
participate in the
conversation?
When?

8. How many conversations
are there?

9. Opening assumptions
• Professionalization is communication.
• Learning to be social is a skill in itself -- and a
process, rather than something that happens
instantly.
• Your value as an academic is more than
merely your finished articles or dissertation.
• Scholarship is cyclical, not linear.

10. Applicable DH Values
•Multimodal
•Adaptive
•Ad hoc
•Social

11. Most social media
platforms are made to
encourage sharing and/or
conversing.

12. Sharing platforms
• Encourage you to upload durable and sizable
content
• Provide infrastructure that encourages you to
organize content in specific/customizable
ways; and develop individual aesthetic design
preferences
• Allow others to navigate freely through present
and past content as it accumulates

13. Conversing platforms
• Encourage you to upload smaller,
transient content
• Provide infrastructure to help you
interact, rather than organize
• Focus on the present, and allow limited
views of past content, especially to
anyone other than you

14. Sharing
Conversin
g

15. Sharing platforms feel more
similar to traditional academic
publishing structures, but
require greater commitments
and more skill.

16. Conversing platforms are
dissimilar to traditional
academic publishing
structures; but are more
conducive to experimenting,
and learning online
communication techniques.

17. While both sharing and
conversing platforms are
useful, you need to be skilled
in conversing platforms in
order to use sharing platforms
to the greatest effect.

18. Why start with
• It’s free! Twitter?
• It’s flexible, but technologically simple to use.
• It comes with a large, curious, and supportive
community.
• It provides you with a rehearsal space.
• It allows you to control information overload easily.
• It’s popular enough that junior and senior academics
from a wide range of disciplines use it, and are
accessible through it.

19. Ingredients for social media
participation
• Curiosity/desire to engage with people you don’t
know
• Varied interests and playfulness, which allow more
than academic interactions
• Awareness, which allows you to choose how
you’re using various tools

20. What do you do when you tweet?
• Report on what you see, hear, or read
• Ask questions (to specific people, or as part of
thinking out loud)
• Describe what you’re working on
• Experiment with different ways of phrasing
ideas
• Agree, and disagree
• Share content that you think other people
should be aware of

21. What are you doing when you’re
• Discover what otohenr p eTopwle airtet elearr?ning and doing
• See academic and public contexts side by side
• Watch projects and ideas evolve through conversation
• Find out about processes and practices at other institutions
(academic and non-academic)
• Support peers and colleagues by showing interest in their
work
• Find content through your contacts (rather than through
search engines)
• Learn through dialogue and interaction

22. What are academics
discussing?
Academic labor
Accessibility
The Value of Scholarship
Race & Social Justice
Contingencies & Budgets
Privilege
Comparative Pedagogies

23. Accounts & Hashtags to explore
• #twitterstorians
• @tressiemcphd
• @erik_kwakkel
• #academia
• @roopikarisam
• @JeffSharlet

24. Questions of identity
• Will you interact as yourself, or under a
pseudonym?
• Will you tweet with a specific focus? (an
aspect of your research, of your
discipline, etc.)

25. Building your own Twitter topic list
(pick one of the following q’s)
What are you working on currently?
What would you like to work on in the future?
What’s the last thing that you read and enjoyed?
What did you like about it?
What’s a non-academic thing that has a connection with your
academic interests?
What would you like to know about using social media?
What topics/activities could you help people understand? (academic
or non-academic)
What would you put on your Twitter profile page?
What’s the most valuable advice you’ve been given recently?
What’s a photo you took recently?
If you were to tweet as a parody of your field/specialty, what would
your persona be?

26. Are academics hacking social
media?
• Hacker: n.
• 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of
programmable systems and how to stretch their
capabilities, as opposed to most users, who
prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
• 7.One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of
creatively overcoming or circumventing
limitations.
• --The Jargon File, http://www.jargondb.org

27. Are academics hacking social
media?
• How do you measure the value of social
media?
• Commercial: through quantitative
metrics, i.e., number of followers, site
visits, etc.
• Academic: through qualitative results,
i.e., confidence and experience gained,
contacts made

28. Are academics using
Twitter to hack the
academy?

30. Social media encourages
the larger academic
conversation to become
more inclusive of multiple
voices.

31. Participating in social
media can help you
become more aware of
your own privilege, as
well as broader issues of
marginalization within
academia.

32. Understanding how the
academy manifests
beyond your own
immediate experience of
it is central to academic
professionalism.

33. PROFESSIONALISM:
MORE THAN JUST GETTING A JOB

34. Building your own Twitter topic list
(pick one of the following q’s)
What are you working on currently?
What would you like to work on in the future?
What’s the last thing that you read and enjoyed?
What did you like about it?
What’s a non-academic thing that has a connection with your
academic interests?
What would you like to know about using social media?
What topics/activities could you help people understand? (academic
or non-academic)
What would you put on your Twitter profile page?
What’s the most valuable advice you’ve been given recently?
What’s a photo you took recently?
If you were to tweet as a parody of your field/specialty, what would
your persona be?

35. Basic Twitter Toolbox
• Twitter’s List function: for filtering different types
of content
• HootSuite, TweetDeck: account management
platforms for reading and managing multiple
feeds
• Storify: for archiving tweets and conversations
• Tweet-a-friend: ask Twitter!

36. Ways to keep
tweeting
• Reading a Twitter list, or feed
• Live-tweeting events
• Participating in weekly chats #fycchat,
#prodchat, etc.
• Schedule Twitter time: 15 minutes per
day? 2 hours per week?

37. Other strategies
• Use search.twitter.com to find people
tweeting about things that interest
youLive-tweeting events
• Find a twitter list curated for a particular
theme (googling is a good way to locate
these)
• Set goals: respond to 2 people per day;
share one link per day, post one thing
you've learned

38. Considering other social media
platforms?
• Read and explore them first, in order to get a
sense of the culture of participation.
• Investigate your options for exporting/backing
up your content.
• Think about how your audience will find you,
and what sort of commitment the platform
requires of them.
• Consider integrating with Twitter in order to
promote and discuss your project.

39. “No! Try not. Do, or do
not. There is no try.”
--Yoda, Star Wars
Episode V: The Empire
Strikes Back
(adapted)

40. Final questions (for now)
• Who are the people that you want to connect
with?
• What knowledge/information would you like to
have access to that you don’t currently have
access to? Who can give you that information?
• What aspects of discussing your work give you
energy? How can you create more
opportunities for that sort of discussion?

41. Next time...
• Non-threatening coding exploration
• Learning to think like a programmer
• You’ve got data! What kind of data is it?
Demystifying Digital Scholarship:
Exploring Programming for Digital Scholarship
January 2015