Round up fact sheet for the seminar on Social Media – Benefits for researchers

During the seminar on Social Media – Benefits for researchers I facilitated on SCoPE all the participants discussed the following topics:

Are you a social media sceptic or evangelist? Which lead to a discussion on the definition of social media. Most of the participants were partly sceptic and evangelist. The evangelists all pointed to the extras of using social media (communication, exchange of knowledge, building a network). But the sceptic part covered the height to which social media is hyped at this moment and the fact that it increases the workload and the amount of knowledge you need to organize/respond to.

To keep from becoming a sceptic it was important to get metrics going on personal social media apps (like sitemeter or cluster maps) or any feedback that shows non-commenting visitors statistics.

There was also a remark that the impact/benefits of social media are still not very clear and metrics are important. It was said that too few innovators and early adopters are actually using Web 2.0 technology to enhance existing learning behaviours (as this article concludes).

Net etiquette: where a 10 step list for net etiquette was posted addressing people that you want to enrol in a discussion forum or learners that start with adding comments in social media.

Discussion on open or closed research, we called it: research should ALWAYS be OPEN to the public at every stage!
A couple of gurus (Jean-Claude Bradley and Cameron Neylon) on open science joined this discussion and pointed out some advantages of open science.

For anyone interested in an overview of social media benefits for researchers, there is a presentation on slideshare. This presentation was the core of the online discussion some of the SCoPE participants had with WiZiQ and which was facilitated by Ignatia de Waard.

Links on topic:
The computer-supported collaborative learning page.
A European research project on pedagogically sustained learning in CoP: the Palette program for anyone interested in learning research.

Categorizing Web2.0 apps
Webel: http://droopy.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webel/

Open science:
The open science blog openwetware .
Open knowledge share http://www.vision2lead.com/html/webinars.html
Open science chemistry http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/
Lexdis: http://www.lexdis.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Topics we did not cover to the full extend, but are related to the topic:
How would you subdivide social media apps with eLearning and/or research in mind?
Are teachers/coordinators using packages of social media with a distinction in the tools they offer depending on the work the learners are involved in?
How would you evaluate social media apps?

Thank you to all participants for making this a good discussion.