Social media for academic purposes
Some people consider social media to be an incredible tool but many are worried about the negative effects
Shaharima Parvin
Social media offers various opportunities to communicate with academia in a speedy and efficient way. It has transformative powers that permit faculty, students, researchers and academician to create influential networks, share innovative ideas and increase new audiences. Everything in the world has two sides; negative and positive. Some people consider social media to be an incredible tool but most are worried about the deleterious effects. The affirmative sides of social media are diverse and faculty, students, researchers, academician should use social media for reasons like professional networking. Facebook is an excellent medium for that. It helps to create online community with students and colleagues. Instagram is widely used for picture-sharing and storytelling. Whereas Twitter lets you put your ideals forward through microblogging to engage with your community. YouTube is the most effective way to share your video presentations and perhaps is still the most popular video upload and share destination. Google+ is used by many for sharing common interests and is a community space from Google. SnapChat lets you create content without a footprint and to reach each other. It is more popular with students. Kahoot is a free game platform that works as educational technology and can be used for formative assessment, to monitor each students progress towards learning objectives, identify strengths and weaknesses, and to identify areas where the students would benefit from more one-to-one teaching, more challenging learning opportunities, or a review of foundational knowledge for that subject. If the short upload limit on YouTube doesnt suit your needs, then upload to Vimeo. Other online networks for sharing interests, pictures and your media content include Pinterest, Flickr and ofcourse iTunes respectively.
Online publishing networks and sites are a blessing for all when it comes to sharing your publications and doing literature review for a paper. Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. By using this site anyone can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, thesis, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other websites. Academia.edu helps you if you want to share your papers, track their impact as well as follow your different colleagues according to your research interest, you can easily open your account in Academia.edu or you can use your Facebook to log in. ResearchGate is acting as another social networking site for academics. If you are a researcher and is interested to increase the impact of published research articles by tracking the most effective networks for getting your work discussed and cited, Kudos is the place for you.
If you are looking for a space to share or publish your articles and research papers or a book, sites like Authorea is an amazing tool to write, cite, collaborate and publish. Similarly CreateSpace is a part of Amazon, helping you to self-publish all those books youve written and Amazon Author Central is for your authored books, link to social media, and for uploading videos. There is more to it for researchers and students alike and those are as follows:
Scribd: To share documents in a large social community.
Diigo is a research and collaborative research tool which creates a knowledge-sharing community
FigShare allows researchers to publish all of their research outputs (presentations, figures, papers, data, etc) in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner.
Hypothes.is: It enables sentence-level note taking or critique on top of news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and more.
Issuu: To upload your pre-prints in a beautiful format for online viewing.
Altmetric: Subscription-based tracker for researcher publications impact across different social media metrics.
Plum Analytics uses research metrics to help answer the questions and tell the stories about research.
JournalMap: It provides a unique new way of uncovering relevant research using study location data and environmental attributes.
Instapaper: If you dont have time to read immediately but want to save for exploring later then you can use it.
Spotify is convenient for music scholars: research, curate, share, publish.
Citations are widely used for avoiding plagiarism but they have other functions too. Proper referencing helps you concede the input of other writers and researcher in your work. Any university assignments that take ideas, words or research of other writers must contain proper credentials. Students and academics alike can draw on from millions of insights, ideas and arguments of other published works of writers. They have spent years researching and writing. All you need to do is acknowledge their contribution to your assignment. Referencing is also a great way to make your work more convincing since it helps you to support your claims and assertions. Mendeley is a reference manager and academic social network that can help you organise your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. Then there is CiteULike. It is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references, whereas EndNote Web is a free online service to store, share and organise your citations so that you can access them from any computer. Zotero is a bibliographic tool that also helps you share resources.
For meetings and group discussions:
Skype for videoconferencing
Doodle is an effective tool of scheduling meetings or making group decisions.
Evernote is a cross-platform app designed for note taking, organising, and archiving.
Eventifier can help to create archives of events.
For concerted work:
Google Drive: For collaborative writing.
Dropbox: For making sure the essentials are backed up, and sharing large files.
Yammer is a freemium enterprise social networking service used for private communication within organisations.
Boost your presentation:
Slideshare: As it says, upload your documents or slides for public viewing.
Prezi: Spice up your presentations with the zooming software, now with 3D.
SlideRocket: Design and share your presentations online.
Glisser: Lift your live presentations with this interactive social platform.
SoundCloud: For anyone wanting to share or find audio material, this is a neat solution.
Sell yourself through website:
WordPress and About.me are the famous website creation platforms by which you can easily create your own website and sell yourself.
LinkedIn: Academia must use this social media. It can help you by displaying your online CV to your preferred employer.
The above tools are the worthy aspects of social media. However social media has devious aspects also. Research suggests that spending more time on using social media leads to create psychological distress such as anxiety, depression, disrupting sleep and so on. We heard about FOMO. This means Fear of Missing Out. Its an anxiety often aroused by posts seen on social media. Cyberbullying is also negative effect of using social media. It is acting as a precursor risk factor for those who have been facing this situation. It has a bad influence on someones mental health, education and social relationships. A lot of people spend time thinking about the negative effects of the social media but we should think about the above mentioned positive sides.
The writer is Assistant Librarian, East West University
