Later this week Anne Alexander from the CRASSH Centre, University of Cambridge will be talking about social media and ethics research at the Social Scholar seminar. It should prove to be an interesting and thought provoking session. How can social media be used for research purposes? What problems arise?
In anticipation of the session I asked Anne if she thought that blogging was a useful pursuit for academics. This was her answer.
Like any other genre of social media publishing, blogging can be useful for academics, or it can be a waste of time. It can be a good mechanism to engage with scholarly or public debate, to ‘think aloud in public’, to establish a online presence for your work or to demonstrate that the public funding for your research career has been well-spent. Or it can eat up a lot of your time and effort to little effect. So I think the key thing probably is to ask yourself what you want to achieve by blogging in the first place, and at which stage in the research process you are going to concentrate your efforts.
I also think that blogging can be an effective tool to help build better networks. I’m designing a new course for graduate historians at Cambridge University, which uses the creation of a collective blog as a teaching platform to explore social media. We are calling it ‘an experiment in learning-by-doing’: like all experiments it will be interesting to see if it works.
Click here for further details about the Digital Historians course. More details about Anne Alexander can be found on her CRASSH profile page. For full details about the Social Scholar seminar check the SAS Blog Social Scholar section where you will find details of this and previous sessions, a more detailed interview with Anne about her session, and videos from the previous sessions.
Date: Wednesday 4 December 2013 Time: 1pm-2pm Event: FREE Public Lunchtime Seminar Title: The ethics of Social Media publishing: a brief introduction for researchers Speaker: Anne Alexander (CRASSH, University of Cambridge) Chair: Jules Winterton (Director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies)
Blogging For Historians 