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![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.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/edentalkgv-161010101710/75/A-Scholarly-Life-Online-George-Veletsianos-EDENRW9-16-2048.jpg)
![(R2 = .83, F[4,459] = 571.42, p < .001).
From Veletsianos & Kimmons (2016)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/edentalkgv-161010101710/75/A-Scholarly-Life-Online-George-Veletsianos-EDENRW9-22-2048.jpg)
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A Scholarly Life Online - George Veletsianos #EDENRW9
The keynote by George Veletsianos discusses networked scholarship, emphasizing scholars' use of participatory technologies and social networks to enhance their academic work. It highlights the challenges faced by faculty in navigating social media, including time demands, maintaining connections, and the complexities of expressing academic identity online. Veletsianos argues for a critical understanding of social media metrics and the importance of recognizing scholars as multifaceted individuals in developing online participation policies.
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A Scholarly Life Online - George Veletsianos #EDENRW9
- 1. Keynote at theEuropean 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.
- 11. Networked Scholarship, or NetworkedParticipatory 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 focuson 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 Authoropen 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 dofaculty face on social media? • Social media activities are rife with tensions, dilemmas, and conundrums. – Time demands – Surveillance ( 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 dofaculty 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 theconundrum around expressing academic identity online? Acceptable Identity Fragments = how academics express themselves online (Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2015)
- 18. Significant. Because weimagine our audiences to be complex Imagined audiences: “mental conceptualization of the people with whom we are communicating”(Litt, 2012)
- 19. Disclosures might havedeeper roots • Disclosures might be tactical – Political – Encourage reflection (Veletsianos & Stewart, 2016)
- 20. So, when institutionsview 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 Twittermetrics 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 creatingpolicies 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 availableat: http://www.veletsianos/publicati ons This presentation: www.slideshare.com/veletsiano s Contact: [email protected] @veletsianos on Twitter
Editor's Notes
- #2 Thank you so much for the invitation to be here today. It’s been a wonderful event and I have learned so much by being here and talking with many of you about online and open education. Today, I want to talk about a topic that you likely have some first-hand experience with. I want to talk about us – academics, faculty, staff, researchers, phd students – and the things that we do when we are online. 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. Both keynotes yesterday mentioned social media and their role in society and academia, so let’s explore that topic a bit further today. First, let’s take a minute and see what we can find out about George if we search his name online. You will quickly figure out a few things.
- #3 You will figure out that I live in British Columbia, and more specifically on Vancouver island, which is the bottom island that you see on the map there.
- #4 Here’s a close up. And if you do some searching, you’ll quickly figure out that Victoria is a beautiful city.
- #5 With its picturesque marinas, and with quick access to the great outdoors.
- #6 These days, fall is just around the corner, so the leaves are changing colours, turning yellow and bright red, and very quickly we will be looking fondly at those pictures as the bright days are replaced by short drizzly ones.
- #7 Going back to what you might be able to decipher when you look me up online, it might be a little bit more difficult, but you might eventually figure out that I grew up in Cyprus, a small island nation situated in the northeast corner of the mediterranean sea. It’s about a four hour flight from here.
- #8 Now, if you happen to be my Facebook friend, and some of you are… you will know that every now and then, when I don’t feel too self-consious about it, I post links to papers that my colleagues and I published. <CLICK> And that I have a cat that has a commanding presence… Her name is Java. Java’s presence is so commanding that she get more facebook ikes <CLICK> that my research. Go figure.
- #9 If you keep on searching you’ll find that I have a blog, I post copies of my papers online on things like academia.edu, and that recently my colleagues and I have been creating short video summaries of our research and posting those on youtube
- #10 So, let’s recap: I have an online presence and I use many of the tools that you also use. Some are used specifically for scholarly purposes. These might be sites I post my papers and research on. Others were not created for scholarly purposes but I use them that way (like youtube, and twitter). Yet others, blend my personal and professional self. My interest is in the blending of personal and professional, and in the decisions that we make about sharing (or not sharing) aspects of who we are. I am interested in this because I think it has important implications for teaching and learning, implications about who we are as educators who make consious decisions about sharing and not sharing about aspects of our lives with our students.
- #11 When I started studying this topic, around 2010-2011, my interest was in scholarship itself, and not as much on the personal aspects of who we are as people. You can see this in the definition we created at the time <CLICK> - READ
- #12 It said:
- #13 I should pause here and mention that researchers are investigating various emergent forms of scholarship. Terms that you might be familiar with include: open scholarship, social scholarship, and digital scholarship. These are similar but differ in some significant ways. However, what they all focus on professional practice and tend to ignore personal aspects of who we are. Researchers need to explore a wider range of academics' online activities to fully understand their online lives. At present, the scholarly community lacks frameworks to make sense of the diversity of scholars' online participation. White and Le Cornu talk about digital residents and digital visitors. Digital Residents are those individuals who consider the web a part of who they are. These are people who consider the web a part of daily life. They might keep a blog, have a picture-sharing site, and cultivate an online presence. For these people, scholarship and the self are intertwined. Residents are those visit the web to do a particular task and then leave. The web is a tool in achieving certain discrete objectives (like finding literature, booking a plane ticket) and then going back to life off the web. SO, as we started studying this topic more, we came to understand various things about academic lives online.
- #14 We learned that many academics, especially ones that are early adopters go on online networks and engage in a number of scholarly pursuits. These might be things like the sharing of draft papers, crowdsourcing, open teaching, and sharing publicly about one’s doctoral research journey. What might be some examples of networked scholarship as we defined it back then: An cultural anthropologist, for instance, might share draft versions of her research on her blog, a geographer might post his syllabus on a document-sharing website, and a political scientist might investigate relationships between social media participation and election results. Many of these activities have historically been discouraged and are not rewarded in the current culture. But the culture is changing and there is increasing recognition that online participation may be a worthwhile endeavor. For example, in august of this year, the American Sociological Association released a report suggesting ways to evaluate and reward online participation.
- #15 In this changing landscape institutions are increasingly encouraging social media participation, parlty because of the benefits such participation will generate for the institution – increased citations, increased media mentions, increased opportunities for funding. That should cause us to pause and ponder because the lens with which insitutions see social media is functional. What function do social media serve? A tool to gain citations, mentions, etc. We should take a moment here. Pause and examine what the experiences of academics who have been online are, and juxtapose those experiences with that institutions seem to wanting.
- #16 In interviewing academics we’ve learned that it takes time to do social media well. And even though I’ve talked about the personal and professional self blending, we know there are tensions and boundaries around what is personal and professional. CLICK
- #17 For example, one academic we interviewed noted:
- #18 What is the conundrum? What is this individual managing? This perspective theorizes that individuals (a) shape their participation online in ways that they believe are “acceptable” to their audiences (e.g., peers, students, employers, family), (b) view their participation to be a direct expression of their identity, and (c) feel this expression to only represent a small “fragment” of their larger sense of self. To put it differently, when we are on social media as us, and not as anonymous or alternative egos, we are really ourselves. We aren’t acting a persona. We aren’t roleplaying. But, our online representation is a fragment of our self. And that expression is shaped by the social context we find ourselves in. What you might share with your significant other will change if you are alone, if your colleagues are around, if your students are around. So, in Facebook, we tend to share things that are acceptable to a diverse group of people and becuas ethat group of people falls into diffeent categories, the things that are acceptable to all of them become les and less, so we share less and less of ourselves.
- #19 Thisis significant because we imagine our audiences to be complex and those imagined audiences shape who we reveal to others. Imagined audiences are the conceptialization of people with who we are communicating. In our research academics, identified 4 specific (at times overlapping) groups: Other academics, family and friends, groups related to one’s profession, individuals who shared commonalities with them. People who are known (like the people in the first row) and people who are familiar but really unknown to us Incompatibility between certain groups When this incompatibility is seen as problematic (context collapse). Solution: attempt to keep audiences separate (filtering what is posted, having multiple facebook accounts, and other strategies to keep audiences separate) At times, seen as potentially beneficial Solution: allow contexts to collapse [“context collusion” – Davis & Jurgenson, 2014] – this might be a case when it indeed might be beneficial for a students to know something more intimate about me because it will aid them pedagogically
- #20 And these discolsures that we make to our students to our colleagues, disclosures about ourselves, about private areas of our life might be tactical. In a recent study we discussed this topic with academics who made intimate discolsures online, disclosures about mental health, physical health, going through a divorce, being scammed online, and so on. And we’ve learnerd that the decision to talk about these things was intentional. It wasn’t accidental or without forethought. It was intentional and political, and it sought to inform, educate, and stand up.
- #21 So, when institutions view social media with a functional perspective… we need to say: wait a minute: Online participation is more than just a quest to gather likes, and retweets, and media attention. For many people it’s a way to find community, a way to hang out with people, and a way to speak truth to power. But, social media are beginning to be co-opted into the institution, And their metrics are beginning be used to assess academic labour and performance, And become part of what the Sociologist Roger Burrows calls audit culture and a complex data assemblage Part of of who we are and what we do. And here, we have to be critical.
- #22 In this final paper I will describe, we sought to understand a large dataset of academics’ twitter participation. We identified 469 student & faculty Twitter accounts & more than 645,000 tweets. We used a hashtag, we coded them individually and then we used the Twitter API to collect their latest tweets. If I recall correctly, latest tweets that the API gives us access to is 3,600 per user. We put a many of these data into a regression to see if we could figure out the relationship between follower counts and other metrics. In other words, we wanted to see if we could predict followers.
- #23 So, we created a model that explains 83% of variation in follower counts and we show that those scholars who follow more users, have tweeted more, signal themselves as professors (instead of students) in their bio and have been on Twitter longer will have more followers. You can see the coefficients of these factors on the table. They are ranked in descending order. Do you want to have more followers for one reason or another? Do these four things. [Converted to log because data showed power law relationships]