Academy 2.0?
The Emerging Digital Culture within Higher
Education
Thursday, 4 April 13

Social Media within Universities
National organizations - RCUK, AHRC, ESRC,
NCRM, professional associations etc
University groups
Universities
Research projects
University services
Academic departments
Individual scholars
Thursday, 4 April 13

So what purpose does this serve?
Enhancing institutional reputation and prestige.
Social media engagement coming to be seen as
integral to marketing and communications strategies
in some institutions.
Need to ‘differentiate’ from other institutions in
increasingly competitive higher education market.
Need to build and sustain relations with students
(former and current) and alumni
Careful management of reputation integral to this -
social media as opportunity AND threat
Thursday, 4 April 13

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But how are researchers using social media...?
• Take-up of most institutionally-provided and open web technology
tools and applications is low among doctoral students overall
• Generation Y doctoral students are more likely than older doctoral
students to use technology to assist them in their research
• Generation Y doctoral students tend to use technology applications
and social media in their research if they augment, and can be easily
absorbed into, existing work practices
• Levels of use of social media and other applications helpful in
retrieving and managing research information are steadily rising
among Generation Y doctoral students, but those applications most
useful for collaboration and scholarly communications remain
among the least used
• Fellow students and peers are the major influence on whether or not
Generation Y doctoral students decide to use a technology
application and are their main source of hands-on help
(JISC Researchers of Tomorrow)
Thursday, 4 April 13

Thursday, 4 April 13

If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and
use web 2.0 - Research Information Network (2010)
Thursday, 4 April 13

Nigel Thrift on emergence of speculative realism
1.Facilitate activity that goes on ‘beneath the radar’ of
‘disciplinary policing’.
2.Allow established figures to communicate in a more immediate
way.
3.Allow researchers to become established more quickly.
4.They loosen disciplinary boundaries, allowing material to be
imported more easily from other disciplines.
5.They make it easier for researchers to communicate, allowing
the exploration and development of topics that may later come
to be profoundly important.
6.New material reaches audiences more rapidly than it would in
traditional scholarly communication.
Thursday, 4 April 13

How are researchers using
blogs...?
Describing PhD ‘journey’, messy reality of
Journey Blogs research
Aiding research productivity, pedagogical
Self Help or ‘Survival’ Blogs and directed at PhD students
Articulating and reflecting on academic
Academic Practice Blogs practice
Academic Blog Aggregators Aggregating a range of content
Research Communication Communicating research and debates
Blogs
HTTP://PATTHOMSON.WORDPRESS.COM/BLOGGING-PAPER-IN-PROGRESS/
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What sort of blog...?
“We don’t think single-author blogs are a sustainable
or genuinely useful model for most academics –
although all praise to the still many exceptional
academics who can manage to keep up the
continuous effort involved. By joining together and
forming multi-author blogs, academics can mutually
reinforce each other’s contributions.”
- Chris Gilson and Patrick Dunleavy
Thursday, 4 April 13

What is ‘publishing’?
“By publishing we mean simply the communication and broad
dissemination of knowledge, a function that has become both
more complex and more important with the introduction and
rapid evolution of digital and networking technologies. There is
a seeming limitless range of opportunities for a faculty member
to distribute his or her work, from setting up a web page or
blog, to posting an article to a working paper website or
institutional repository, to including it in a peer-reviewed
journal or book.”
- Laura Brown, Rebecca J. Griffiths, Matthew Rascoff & Kevin Guthrie
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At root it’s a WEIRD business model...
“Publishers have a mediating role in the
industry. They collect, package and
disseminate the articles produced by faculty
authors. The primary user of the journals is
the very same group that produced journal
content – faculty of colleges and universities.
After journal content is consumed by the
faculty/scholars, new knowledge and research
is produced and continues the cycle.”
McGuigan and Russell (2008)
And this weird business model has very real day-to-day consequences for researchers...
Thursday, 4 April 13

“universities have been translated from
collegial collectivities, supporting intra- and
inter-psychic freedom for community
members, to managed power hierarchies
that govern (a broader spectrum of)
individuals through techniques of
accounting, audit and surveillance”
Boden, R. and Epstein, D. (2011) “A flat earth society? Imagining academic
freedom”.The Sociological Review, 59:3, pp.478-479
Thursday, 4 April 13

The tension between using social media to
communicate and using social media because ‘we have
to these days’
The tension between marketing/communications and
research-led use of social media
The institutional recognition of ‘non-traditional’ digital
outputs
The possibility of a ‘new collegiality’ facilitated through
increasingly autonomous networks
The changing public role of academics, as well as
broader ramifications of an extended communicative
repertoire
Thursday, 4 April 13

FURTHER READING
LSE Impact Blog - http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/
Cameron Neylon- http://cameronneylon.net/
The Scholarly Kitchen - http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/
Bjorn Brembs - http://bjoern.brembs.net/
Stephen Curry - http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/
Scholarly Publishing Bundle - http://bundlr.com/b/scholarly-publishing-open-access-
and-the-academic-spring
@MARK_CARRIGAN
MARK@MARKCARRIGAN.NET
WWW.MARKCARRIGAN.NET
Thursday, 4 April 13