I want to use our online presence as a way to help us think through one big idea: who we are when we are online as educators. What do professors do online? Is there anything special about faculty members who are online? Does their use of social media differ from the general population? Do they also post pictures of their children food, and cats? In this presentation, I will discuss how/why academics use social media and online networks, and explore aspects of online participation that is unique to scholars. I will discuss the opportunities and tensions that exist in online spaces, and share recent original research that shows how small data, as well as big data, can help us make sense of professors’ (and thereby students’) participation in online spaces.

1. Keynote at the European Distance and E-Learning Network Research Workshop
Oldenburg, October 2016
A Scholarly Life Online
George Veletsianos, PhD
Canada Research Chair & Associate Professor
Royal Roads University
Victoria, BC
Canada

9. • Academic-specific technologies
• Repurposed technologies

10. Conceptual framework:
Networked Scholarship

11. Networked Scholarship, or
Networked Participatory Scholarship:
“scholars’ use of participatory technologies
and online social networks to share, reflect
upon, critique, improve, validate, and further
their scholarship” (Veletsianos & Kimmons,
2012)
Conceptual framework:
Networked Scholarship

12. Open/Social/Digital Scholarship
These focus on a fragment of scholars' online
activities and have ignored other aspects of
online presence.
White & Le Cornu (2011):
Digital Residents & Visitors
Conceptual framework:
Networked Scholarship

13. Post draft papers
Author open textbooks
Share Syllabi + Activities
Live streaming
Live-Blogging
Collaborative authoring
Debates + commentary
Open teaching
Public P&T materials
The doctoral journey (e.g.,
#PhDChat)
Crowdsourcing
Share information
Veletsianos (2012, 2013)

15. What challenges do faculty face on
social media?
• Social media activities are rife with tensions,
dilemmas, and conundrums.
– Time demands
– Surveillance ( à High-profile cases e.g., Salaita, Kansas
Board of regents)
– Maintaining appropriate and meaningful connections
– Gender and socioeconomic issues
– Establishing personal-professional boundaries

16. What challenges do faculty face on
social media?
• Social media activities are rife with tensions,
dilemmas, and conundrums.
“I made it [Facebook] this hybrid space ... and
sometimes it's really annoying. … I keep thinking I should
be writing or looking at data, [but instead I am
managing the different groups of people that are my
Facebook friends] … I think that I created the
conundrum that I live in now.”

17. What is the conundrum around
expressing academic identity online?
Acceptable Identity Fragments = how
academics express themselves online
(Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2015)

18. Significant. Because we imagine our
audiences to be complex
Imagined audiences: “mental conceptualization of the people
with whom we are communicating”(Litt, 2012)

19. Disclosures might have deeper roots
• Disclosures might be tactical
– Political
– Encourage reflection
(Veletsianos & Stewart, 2016)

20. So, when institutions view social media
with a functional perspective…
• They become part of an “audit
culture” and “a complex data
assemblage that confronts the
individual academic” (Burrows, 2012)

21. What do Twitter metrics mean? Can they be
used to evaluate a scholars’ reach or impact?
We have to think critically about
social media metrics & their meaning

22. (R2 = .83, F[4,459] = 571.42, p < .001).
From Veletsianos & Kimmons (2016)

23. To close…
In creating policies that govern online participation,
recognize that scholars participating online are not
merely disembodied personas aiming to amass
citations and followers and that social media
metrics may not mean what you think they mean.

24. Thank you!
Research available at:
http://www.veletsianos/
publications
This presentation:
www.slideshare.com/
veletsianos
Contact:
veletsianos@gmail.com
@veletsianos on Twitter