June 5, 2013, 11:00 am
By George Williams
Each Wednesday, ProfHacker hosts an open thread discussion. Sometimes a specific topic is announced, and sometimes the discussion is completely open. Please remember to abide by our commenting and community guidelines. Thanks!
Even before evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller hit “send” on his idiotic Tweet, I’d been thinking about asking people what kind of social media policy might be in place on their campus.
I (quite literally) just did a quick search on the site for the University of South Carolina Upstate, where I work, and found these :
That first link is a page of advice; the second specifies what is and is not allowed by the university and includes this paragraph:
The purpose of the Social Media Policy is to ensure accuracy, consistency, integrity and protection of the …
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April 2, 2013, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
[This post originally appeared on MediaCommons, in response to the question "What are the major social, legal, and professional stakes with sharing online"? Because ProfHacker has addressed similar questions about online identities and social media, I am reproducing the post here. I welcome your comments at the end.]
When it comes to scholarship, pedagogy, and service — the three pillars of the professoriate — I am a staunch supporter of open access and the ideal of an intellectual commons that we can all learn from, discuss and critique, and build upon. But I recently had an unsettling experience that’s made me question my assumptions about making so much of my life public.
My experience played out against the milieu of Twitter, where I’ve been active for over five years. My Twitter stream is comprised of digital humanists, electronic literature creators and theorists,…
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March 28, 2013, 8:00 am
By Prof. Hacker
[This is a guest post by Lisa Rhody, who works for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University as the project manager for WebWise 2013.
She is currently working on a project called Revising Ekphrasis, which uses advanced computational tools to explore connections between 4,500 English-language poems. You can find her online at LisaRhody.com and follow her on Twitter at @lmrhody.]
In last week’s post about social network analysis, I introduced NodeXL and its potential use for understanding online social networks. In this post, I want to focus on what we can learn from conference Twitter backchannel conversations, and how we can use software like NodeXL to improve the way we use social media to build computer-mediated scholarly networks.
During this year’s annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, I worked with Marc Smith, co-founder of …
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March 27, 2013, 8:00 am
By Mark Sample
As the culminating move of a Twitter-based storytelling experiment, I recently deleted my Twitter account. One minute it was there, all twenty-six thousand and something tweets, and the next it was gone. My tweets, my favorites, my lists, my followers — all gone. A number of friends were in disbelief that I had so summarily erased everything that I had ever written on Twitter. Not only had I evidently turned my back on the social networking service, I had destroyed all the symbolic capital that I had built up on it. Were it not for an off-site back-up, no trace at all would have remained of my years on Twitter.
But I knew something most people didn’t.
You don’t — you can’t – delete a Twitter account. At least not at first. Instead, you deactivate it.
You do this on your settings page. There at the very bottom, directly below the button to request your Twitter archive, there…
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March 19, 2013, 1:00 pm
By Prof. Hacker
[This is a guest post by Lisa Rhody, who works for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University as the project manager for WebWise 2013.
She is currently working on a project called Revising Ekphrasis, which uses advanced computational tools to explore connections between 4,500 English-language poems. You can find her online at LisaRhody.com and follow her on Twitter at @lmrhody.]
From early posts about scholarly uses of social media to more recent entries on its usefulness for improving student engagement, there seems to be a general consensus among ProfHacker writers that the use of social media promotes the widening of scholarly networks. Keeping in mind that online social networks extend beyond the obvious Twitter and Facebook—blogs, podcasts, wikis, and photo/video sharing sites are a few other forms of social media—the vexing question to…
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March 11, 2013, 11:00 am
By Prof. Hacker
[This is a guest post by Carol Holstead and Doug Ward. Carol Holstead is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas. She currently teaches visual storytelling, magazine writing and multimedia reporting; she was the 2010 Budig Professor of Writing. If you're on Facebook, feel free to ask to join the group Visual Storytelling Spring 2013 if you want to see the page in action.
Doug Ward is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, where he is teaching a research and digital literacy course he developed called Infomania. You can find him online at www.kuediting.com and www.journalismtech.com, and follow him on Twitter @kuediting.--@JBJ]
Like many followers of ProfHacker, we like to experiment with social media in our classrooms. And though digital tools have become an integral part of our efforts to engage students, we’re continually …
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February 14, 2013, 11:00 am
By Anastasia Salter
If you haven’t fled Facebook for Google+ or abandoned social networks entirely, you probably–like me–have a lot invested in the platform. A new feature is in beta on Facebook: Graph Search. If you get through the waiting list to try it out, you’ll find lots of options for targeted searches centered on your social network. Graph search works by linking together terms and restrictions to allow for very specific searches within the network: you can look for images from friends based on a common location or subject, or find everyone in your social network who went to the same university and are fans of Glee. Is it useful? The possibilities for networking–from finding local friends who share a passion for running to gathering info on a potential new campus to making connections at a company–are immediately clear. But it’s also a powerful (and perhaps alarming) data mining tool that puts…
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January 14, 2013, 8:00 am
By Prof. Hacker
[This is a guest post by Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig, the writers behind @occupymla. Mark teaches at the University of Southern California, and Rob teaches at University of Minnesota Duluth, both as non-tenure-track faculty. You can find out more about each of them via their websites -- http://markcmarino.com/ and http://robwit.net/ -- or follow them on Twitter: @markcmarino, @Netprov_RobWit, & @occupymla).]
@occupymla: In our list of demands, only the Oxford comma divides us!
@occupymla: Do not let the hiring committees tell you the value of your scholarship. Join us!
What Was Occupy MLA?
On November 8, 2011, a new sect of the Occupy movement appeared. Actually, the movement had appeared just a day earlier, first mentioned when @markcmarino was describing a speech he was giving in his candidacy for a Modern Language Association (MLA) committee. In the fictional Tweet, Mark…
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October 9, 2012, 9:07 am
By George Williams
One of the most frustrating aspects of using information and communications technology (ICT) is the frequency with which things don’t work, where “things” equals just about any hardware or software tool that you could possibly name. Monitors start flickering, files won’t open, obscure error messages crowd your screen, hard drives make funny noises… you name it. One of the most rewarding aspects of using ICT is the access it provides to an enormous network of people who might be able to help you. Twitter can be an extremely effective way of getting your questions answered, but it also teaches us some important lessons about the right ways to ask questions.
In one of my classes this semester, students are learning to use a variety of software tools to create online resources. Like all of us, they are frequently running into problems or roadblocks. This is often how one learns: trial a…
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October 8, 2012, 8:00 am
By Anastasia Salter
Last week, Adeline chronicled the recent “Twittergate” and considered the best practices for tweeting at conferences. I’m a huge fan of conference backchannels, particularly since my work is very interdisciplinary and it seems there’s an interesting conference every weekend that I wish I could attend. Twitter offers some insight into what happens in those spaces. How much insight? It depends–but not just on those tweeting. The presenters can play a big role in determining how accessible their work is to those looking in.
Why encourage tweeting of your work? There’s been lots of discussion of the value of academic tweeting and open exchange of ideas, which is important philosophically and part of why I tweet a conferences. But there’s also value to you as the presenter–feedback, a chance for extended conversations, and even the potential for finding collaborators, publishers, or new…
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