Social media for collaborative research

SlideShare presentation on using social media

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The World Wide Web Show Engage Your Supporters with Real-Time Social Media Chad Norman, Internet Marketing Manager

Work-life-social media balance

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An article in today's Melbourne Age sets out some of the possible costs and benefits of spending lots of time using social media. The comments at the bottom are particularly useful in showing the span of experiences, from some who have found them to be of no benefit:

I've tried them all and they all bored me in short time. I have a couple of hundred Facebook friends and I really struggle to think of a single useful piece of information I've gleamed from it

and others who have found them enriching personally and professionally:

I keep in touch with my family (adult children) and friends much more regularly via Facebook posts and pics in between personal face to face times. ... I have made many friends with business associates via the personalisation of Facebook. It's a winner for me!

Over the past few weeks I've shared celebrations (a new grandson for a colleague), condolences (my old dog died), annoyances (my niece found a large spider in a pile of clothes), and humour (my nephew was feeding his 6 mpnth old son cereal when he sneezed it all over the carpet). I've had a long skype chat with a friend and colleague who is on the road and had some time to talk about some common research interests and planned papers on methods for understanding causal links between interventions and observed results. I've worked up a research proposal with a colleague who is based in another state using email. And I've harvested far too many crops on the Facebook application FarmVille rather than pulling real weeds in my real garden. So it's not all been so constructive. But I think we are all learning about the new possibilities that these offer and over time we will hang onto the ones that work and drop those that don't, hanging onto a few timewasters (like FarmVille) as harmless diversions in between work and life.

Rules of engagement for online discussions

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Discussions can easily become heated in online discussions. 'Flame wars' can escalate rapidly and lead to lasting ruptures within professional and social communities. Guidelines for constructive dialogue across difference can help to reduce this risk.

Here is a set of guidelines from a blog, The Questioning Christian, that was preparing the ground for discussions about different views within the Christian church. From the comments on the page, it was not entirely successful, but they are still worth a look:

Take the hit
Don't get personal, even indirectly
Take the trouble to signal your friendliness
Let the facts argue for themselves
Be careful about categorical statements
Watch your phrasing
No-no's: Some things not to say: babble (as a noun), disgraceful, drivel, farce, gutless, simpering , excuse, utter nonsense, wacko, whining, yahoos (in reference to people)

Information on 3 common tools for social media - blogs, wikis and microblogging

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The Knowledge Sharing ToolKit Wiki www.kstoolkit.org has information on many different knowledge sharing tools and methods. It is produced by the ICT-KM Program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the KM4Dev Community. It has a particular focus on agriculture, fisheries, food and nutrition, forestry and sustainable development in international development.

Its resources include the following pages on three common social media tools:

Blogs http://www.kstoolkit.org/Blogs

Wikis http://www.kstoolkit.org/Wikis

Twitter/Microblogging http://www.kstoolkit.org/Microblogging

Purpose of the blog

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This blog has been created as part of learning how to use social media for international collaborative research.

I am currently taking a three week online course in social media for development, led by Nancy White. I have set up this blog as a way of bringing together resources, ideas and examples as I come across them, and experimenting with some of them.

Comments welcome!