As Cann pointed out when I talked to him, it is very difficult to appreciate the benefits of using social media unless you try it out, and use it long enough to see a return on your investment.
That said, there are costs to not using social media too. The best way to decide what works for you is to try it, be prepared to invest a little, and judge the outcome for yourself.
In order to develop my skills I did at times attempt to ‘reinvent the wheel’ which I admit now was not necessary as the majority of the applications already exist in the most user-friendly form. The question is knowing how to use them effectively.
The Thesis Whisperer is a 'newspaper' dedicated to the topic of doing a thesis. Are you a PhD student with a blog? Please let us know and we will add you to our homepage.
This image maps out a range of purposes for reading or writing blogs with repect to author (student, tutor) and audience (self - rest of the world) on a 4 quadrant matrix.
For one thing, the people who were talking on blogs and Twitter were not in their pajamas. Many of them were in lab coats. They were practicing scientists who wanted to have an open debate.
Post-publication peer review—and open science in general—is attracting a growing number of followers in the scientific community. But some critics have argued that it's been more successful in theory than in practice. The #arseniclife affair is the one of the first cases in which the scientific community openly vetted a high-profile paper, and influenced how the public at large thought about it.
I certainly think long and hard about what I write on this blog, because with between 1000-2000 views per day, and a stream of comments coming in from those who either agree or disagree with my views, I sure feel as though I am being peer reviewed.
They have credibility in a different sense to peer reviewed journal articles.
One final word: We need to remember that professionals built the Titanic, but an amateur built the Ark. It's not always about expertise - sometimes it's about passion.
Overall, just under 41 percent of seniors taking part in NACE's 2011 Student Survey reported using some form of social media in their job search.
Among that group, those with LinkedIn profiles and Twitter accounts are much more likely to use social networking in their job searches than students with just Facebook profiles.
What are the key features of social media and just what is their significance to contemporary higher education? How are social media applications currently being used in higher education settings? What changes does higher education need to make in order to remain relevant in the apparently fast-changing digital age?
"Of course, clear lines need to be drawn between the immediate practical tasks of developing forms of social media use that better fit within the current 'grammar' of formal higher education systems, and addressing the rather more difficult longer-term issues of system-wide reform and redesign. In terms of this latter point, there is a clear need to thoroughly consider and discuss what higher education is, and what forms it should take in a 21st-century digital age. Indeed, many of the controversies and tensions concerning the use of social media in higher education have little to do with the technology itself. Instead, these are issues that are driven by personal belief and opinion about 'the essentially ethical question [of] what counts' as worthwhile learning and worthwhile education (Standish, 2008: 351). In this sense, social media are socially disruptive technologies that prompt a range of deeply ideological (rather than purely technical) questions about the nature of institutionalized education."
"Social media is becoming increasingly important in teaching and research work but tutors must remember, it's a conversation not a lecture, says Ernesto Priego"