This summer I will be co-chairing, with Stefania Manca (from The Institute of Educational Technology of the National Research Council of Italy) “Social Media in Education”, a Mini Track of the European Conference on Social Median (#ECSM17) in Vilnius, Lithuania. As the call for papers has been out for a while (deadline for abstracts: 12th December 2016) I wanted to remind and encourage you to consider submitting to the conference and, particularly, for our Mini Track, which we hope will highlight exciting social media and education research.
An expanding amount of social media content is generated every day, yet organisations are facing increasing difficulties in both collecting and analysing the content related to their operations. This mini track on Big Social Data Analytics aims to explore the models, methods and tools that help organisations in gaining actionable insight from social media content and turning that to business or other value. The mini track also welcomes papers addressing the Big Social Data Analytics challenges, such as, security, privacy and ethical issues related to social media content. The mini track is an important part of ECSM 2017 dealing with all aspects of social media and big data analytics.
Reflective and conceptual studies of social media for teaching and scholarly purposes in higher education.
Innovative experience or research around social media and the future university.
Issues of social media identity and engagement in higher education, e.g: digital footprints of staff, students or organisations; professional and scholarly communications; and engagement with academia and wider audiences.
Social media as a facilitator of changing relationships between formal and informal learning in higher education.
The role of hidden media and backchannels (e.g. SnapChat and YikYak) in teaching, learning.
Social media and the student experience.
The conference, the 4th European Conference on Social Media (ECSM) will be taking place at the Business and Media School of the Mykolas Romeris University (MRU) in Vilnius, Lithuania on the 3-4 July 2017. Having seen the presentation on the city and venue at this year’s event I feel confident it will be lovely setting and should be a really good conference. (I also hear Vilnius has exceptional internet connectivity, which is always useful).
I would also encourage anyone working in social media to consider applying for the Social Media in Practice Excellence Awards, which ECSM is hosting this year. The competition will be showcasing innovative social media applications in business and the public sector, and they are particularly looking for ways in which academia have been working with business around social media. You can read more – and apply to the competition (deadline for entries: 17th January 2017)- here.
This is a really interdisciplinary conference with a real range of speakers and topics so a great place to showcase interesting applications of and research into social media. The papers presented at the conference are published in the conference proceedings, widely indexed, and will also be considered for publication in: Online Information Review (Emerald Insight, ISSN: 1468-4527); International Journal of Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments (Inderscience, ISSN 2050-3962); International Journal of Web-Based Communities (Inderscience); Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (Emerald Insight, ISSN 1477-996X).
So, get applying to the conference and/or to the competition! If you have any questions or comments about the Social Media in Education track, do let me know.
Today I have been liveblogging – by invitation no less – at the Society of Young Publishers Conference 2013 in Oxford, and EDINA is proud to sponsor the event through my participation. The event in entitled “Life in Publishing: It’s more than just books (and Tumblr)“, it’s theme being the future of publishing into the digital (and the inspiration for the name coming from this Tumblr blog).
You can also view tweets from the event on #SYPC13.
Anyone interested in data, app development, digital publishing or disruption should find something of interest in there… and for me it has been a fun and informative day! And if you have been at the conference and are interested in what EDINA does around publishing and publishers I would recommend taking a look at the UK LOCKSS Alliance, CLOCKSS, The Keepers Registry, and The UK Access Management Federation.
Repository Fringe 2013 now open for registration – and social media participation!
This year I have the great honour of being Chairing Repository Fringe 2013 (#rfringe13), the annual unconference on all things repository related. There will be several posts appearing here over the coming months in the lead up to our three days (31st July – 2nd August 2013) of repository ideas and fun and that kicks off today as I’m excited to say that registration is now open!
Now, as my job title is Social Media Officer, you may be wondering about the connection between repositories and social media. However, I have been involved in the organisation of Repository Fringe for some years now both because of my own event amplifying skills (I wrote a book chapter on amplification of Repository Fringe 2009), but also because social media is increasingly important for link sharing, for scholarly discourse, for information discovery. That makes social media increasingly important for publications, for research impact and for the use and visibility of materials deposited in repositories of all flavours – see, for example Melissa Terra’s April 2012 post for the LSE Impact of Social Sciences’ blog on the impact of blogging and tweeting research papers ).
Repository Fringe also embodies many of the core social media values of enabling community participation and authorship. The event is designed by and for the repository community and everyone who registers (free of charge) is encouraged to participate at every level of the event, from organising, to presenting, to amplifying and, of course, socialising. For me this has always made each event an opportunity to use or try out social media with a really up-for-it community – who picked up and embraced Twitter early, are always keen to share their images, presentations and expertise; who surface new ideas and great new ways to use these technologies in their own professional contexts; and who always provide thoughtful questions and reflections on the ways in which repositories and social media can work together.
So, if you have an interest in repositories then please do register for this year’s event. And otherwise expect a few more posts on how we are using social media this year, why we have chosen to use the combination of social spaces we have, and what we have learned from this year’s event.
Today I will be liveblogging the eLearning@Ed 2011 conference which is taking place at the National eScience Centre at Edinburgh University today. The usual rules of liveblogging apply of course – posts will be updated through the day and there will be typos, errors, etc. that I will be correcting as I spot them or when I clean up this blog post at the end of the day.
This is the 8th eLearning @Ed conference. Emphasized that Informatics one of the top 5 depts in the world, a leader in ISG etc. All 3 colleges and ISG are here represented today. We are a really huge university. We could have just had elearning in Moray House or the Vet School but a fundamental of the approach that Jeff Hayward and I have taken is to make sure there isn;t just one unit where all elearning is based but a community across the university. The university’s mission is to ensure we have valuable non trivial use of elearning across the university. We are doing something new here, we are creating new spaces for students to learn in. At events like this we can think about taking best advantage of the unique aspects of elearning.It is not about economics but about the student experience.