Social media and higher education

Many scientists are making the move towards social media in order to accelerate  and amplify their scientific impact (Fausto et al. 2012; Fox 2012; Piwowar 2013). One in 40 scientists is active on Twitter (Priem et al. 2012a), 25,000 blog entries have been indexed on the Research Blogging platform, and 2 million scientists are using Mendeley, a reference sharing tool (Piwowar 2013). Here, we consider 140 how social media, and Twitter in particular, can influence the life cycle of scientific publication, from inception and collaboration on a spark of an idea to the communication of a finished product. Specifically, we evaluate and discuss the benefits of Twitter for (1) increasing scholarly connections and networks, (2) quickly developing ideas through novel collaborations and pre-review, and (3) amplifying the dissemination and discussion of scientific knowledge both within and beyond the ivory tower of academia.

The impact of scientific papers has traditionally been measured in terms of
numbers of citations (Neylon and Wu 2009). Tweeting can influence this impact metric. For example, articles published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research that were tweeted about frequently in the first three days following publication were 11 times more likely to be highly cited 17 to 29 months later than  less tweeted articles (Eysenbach 2011). In fact, top-cited articles could be predicted quite accurately from their early tweeting frequency (Eysenbach 2011). In a separate study of ~4600 scientific articles published in the preprint database  arXiv.org, Shuai et al. (2012) found that papers with more mentions on Twitter were also associated with more downloads and early citations of papers, although the causality of these relationships is unclear (Shuai et al. 2012).

Paper available on PeerJ discusses the role of Twitter in the lifecycle of a scientific publication.

estudo conclui que o Twitter contribui para a publicação científica no século 21

This is a very comprehensive guide (28 pages), but it is absolutely worth spending some time with!

Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility
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Blogging

Realize that students may not consider blogging because they don't know anything about it. This stuff is not taught in most North American schools. I recall speaking to a group of grade 12s and someone asked me what a blog was.

As if we had to support why blogging is important to students ... well, of course we do, and if you are in the position of reaching into your quivver for the arrow that will hit the target, this one has it all, a research base and a wow graphic. Run this by your curriculum coordinator :-)

with the increase in mash-up content, the issues of IP such as this would need our attention and commonsense.

Features, best practices, copyright, use and examples of content curation. Basically everything it is useful to know about content curation. Plenty of useful information.

Original scoop by Robin Good,

Author: Pawan Deshpande of Curata

Full guide: http://www.contentcurationmarketing.com/content-curation-copyright-ethics-fair-use

add your insight...

Overcoming Hurdles to Social Media in Education - published in EduCause

This looks really cool - social network analysis can be a really useful tool for teaching and student reflection.

That will change everything that is good in the class room.

the question is not if they use it, but how they do it... right?