This post will take around 197 seconds to read.
February was a non-event tracking wise as I’ve been busy with other things. Time to draw a line under it!
The use of social media in higher education was highlighted by #dr12vitae, or Digital Researcher 2012, on 20 February - topnotch coverage from four sessions looking at the stages of the academic knowledge cycle now filed away for a rainy day.
Some Twitter archiving and social network analysis links:
- The Archivist #dr12vitae archive currently shows nearly 2000 tweets; I stuck it into Socialbro at one point which showed 267 people had used the tag
- TAGS spreadsheet and conversation cloud from @mhawksey
- coupla visualisations from @psychemedia with the usual caveat – how many folk might have seen tag | folk commonly followed by users of tag
Alan Cann, clearly not scared of giving a new service a whirl, set up a #dr12vitae Pinterest board. I didn’t think he was serious at first, but it is another option for curating event resources. I still prefer Scoopit, not least because it offers tags and seems a little less Desperate Housewives.
Also in highered, #cetis12 on 22-23 February was generally a bit tecchie for me but I would have killed to be at the social network analysis session (links to slides and stuff) – sometimes you need to be there to actually get to grips with something. May try to dig tweets for the SNA session out of the #cetis12 TAGS spreadsheet, now how might I do that?? Unlike most JISC events this one didn’t give much of a nod to a potential online audience and its web presence was a bit disjointed – there’s also a JISC CETIS event page, with the programme finally located on a wiki.
22 February saw the first #tartantm, meetups/TweetMeets around Scotland for people using social media in the public sector, tweeting live and engaging with real members of the public. As an exiled Scot I have to keep an eye on these things…@Cal444 has written an account of how it came about - “organised for free, with very little overall effort, just a little synergy happening from six ingredients” - and ran a Tweetreach report showing #tartantm tweets reaching a potential 97,066 people via 530 tweets, nice work. TweetGrid was used to track tweets – haven’t seen this before but looks similar to Tweetchat if more messy. @prettysimple’s report on the Embra tweetup gives some nuggets from the conversations and admits that talking and tweeting at the same time is hard!
The UK Content Strategy Association’s February meeting on the 15th took the form of a debate on whether content strategy is just a fashionable buzzword (or two). Apparently it isn’t. Phew.
Some chats, webinars:
- Two digests from January popped up from #Cmgrchat – on community manager burnout (kinda the source of my problems) and automation ie scheduling issues; with 800 odd tweets per chat unless you take part, a different experience entirely, a decent summary is essential so woot.
- The Guardian’s Higher Education Network hosted a chat on 24 February on Using new tools to communicate research, but I can’t spot any form of summary/round-up. There’s a list of chats plus the #HElivechat hashtag, but it’s evolving, shall we say.
- JISC Digital Media’s online surgery on ebooks on 22 Feb looks like a useful primer with lots of links to follow up. There’s a nice overview from NewT Bham as well.
There’s a distinct lack of Danish events here, must do better. One reason is the ‘closed shop’ nature of the Danish workplace, governed by a whole swathe of foreninger, or associations, some linked to trade unions and/or unemployment funds. For those not following an established Danish career path it can be hard to break in – or even locate yourself in space. A few meetup/unconference type events do take place, but they seem more fringe (in more ways than one…) than is the case in the UK.
As you say, Pinterest was an experiment for #DR12vitae. I’m not sure I like it much, but I can imagine circumstances where it would be very useful, e.g. sharing slides.