Graduate Junction is an online community connecting postgraduates who have similar academic interests. Graduate Junction aims to break down the interdisciplinary and institutional barriers that exist in academia and connect people based only on the work that they do and the interests that they have. Graduate Junction was founded in 2008 by two postgraduates at Durham University working alongside their own degree projects because they felt isolated in their own fields. When the first version of the Graduate Junction platform was launched it received support from postgraduates and academics alike. It has continued to grow with the community now containing almost 16,000 members.
The community has continued to evolve over time with new functions and features added based upon suggestions from the community itself. All functionality added to the site since its launch has been requested by postgraduates. Despite having no external funding or support these changes have been made possible thanks to the time input of postgraduate volunteers, making Graduate Junction an entirely postgraduate-led initiative.
Social media trends for 2011 from HBR. Worth a look, even if you don't agree with many of them (like me). I do think these trends have a distorted bias towards business and that misses the point really. There is also a growing push-back against Facebook that is ignored by this analysis from the US.
Released in February 2011, this guide for researchers introduces some basics about how social media may be of use and highlights some basic social media tools.
Free professional network for scientists. Has useful tools to help - Connect and Communicate: Interact with fellow researchers and build your scientific network. Share and Collaborate: Post updates, discuss methods and co-edit with colleagues. Discover: Download full-text papers, find conferences and scientific jobs.
This pulls in feeds from others who blog about peer-reviewed research. Makes it easy for your readers - and others from around the world - to find your serious posts about academic research.
ScienceStage is a global, science-oriented multimedia portal that specializes in online video streaming, which is used to support communication between scientists, scholars, researchers in industry, and professionals. It is also used by academics and students as a virtual educational tool. Video content ranges from conference recordings, to interviews, documentaries, webinars, and tutorials. ScienceStage, as its slogan suggests, also functions as a 'hub' by creating a meta-layer that enables the networking of both users (individuals and groups) and content (video, audio, and documents), which forms an integrated multimedia and social networking platform for scientists.
Labmeeting's mission is to help researchers work more efficiently. It offers researchers a web service to organize, collect, and share scientific papers.
How to use the Web to find content for your talks, record them, share them with others and save them for future audiences. Also explains how to share it all for free and how to convert closed formats into open ones by using the Web. A really useful review of mostly free software.
A presentation by UTS PhD candidate Penny Hagen (FEIT) on her research into the use of social technologies and participative methodology in the design process.
Collaboration platform designed specifically for researchers in the science, technical and medical communities providing online bookmarking & reference management, groups, networking.
Quora's service allows users to ask questions and give answers. Additionally, users can comment on the questions and answers and "upvote" or "downvote" the answers. An "Answer Summary" can be created to reflect the consensus of the community. This summary is a wiki that can be edited by any registered user.
ResearcherID is a global, multi-disciplinary scholarly research community. With a unique identifier assigned to each author in ResearcherID, you can eliminate author misidentification and view an author's citation metrics instantly. Search the registry to find collaborators, review publication lists and explore how research is used around the world.
cademia.edu is a free social networking website and collaboration tool aimed at academics and researchers from all disciplines. Like Facebook or LinkedIn for academics, but not as annoying or distracting. Very focussed on academia.
Launched in September 2008, it became one of the largest social networking sites/portals for academics in 2010.
Nice essay by Brungs & Mcnamara about the importance of research being accessible to the general public and its potential as a catalyst for public debate.
Presentation about the costs of higher education (albeit US costs) and some alternative ways we can assist including more open access, social media and social networks.