Potential tools and technologies for improving staff digital literacy
Last week I wrote about my plan
to improve staff digital literacy by assisting a small group of staff (6) members
to enhance their digital profiles. The
idea behind my study was inspired in part by a presentation by Laura Czerniewicz
at UCT entitled “Academic’s Online Presence – Assessing and Shaping your
Visibility.” (2012)
Five people were enthusiastic and
agreed to join, one declined without providing a reason. In order to arrive at a mutually beneficial
partnership whereby this group of five academics would participate in my
project I set out to ensure that they would attain easily visible and
discernible benefits by participating. A
one hour briefing was held for the participants during which the project itself
was explained as well as how the following six weeks would roll out. The staff were excited about the outcomes
which were listed as:
·
Improved digital literacy.
·
A free online image makeover.
·
Improved digital curatorship of both research as
well as choice presentations.
·
The future expansion of academic research networks.
·
The ability to assess how often their online
presence/work are being viewed or utilised.
·
Participation in the growing open access
environment.
In addition to the briefing the participants were asked to
complete a brief online survey which I created in google docs. This was a first for me so I guess I was the
first beneficiary of the digital literacy drive! So far four of the five group members have
responded to the questionnaire. The aim
of the questionnaire was to establish the degree of the participants’ online
activity including access issues as well as tools which they are already using.
The Tools
The tools were selected based upon the various affordances highlighted
in various pieces of literature. During
my literature search I used a collection of academic articles, technical
magazine publications, slideshare presentations and blogs. After doing some research I decided to make
use of the following tools:
·
Academia.edu
·
Linkedin
·
Slideshare
·
Twitter
·
Google sites
The plan at this stage is to introduce a tool a week. The participants will be required to master
the first three tools by themselves whilst I will be available to assist with
any problems or questions they may have.
The remaining tools (Twitter and Google Sites) will be preceded by a
briefing on how to effectively use the tools and implement them.
Academia.Edu
This website is a powerful tool used by millions of
academics to network professionally as well as upload their research papers to
a single, searchable destination. In a
nutshell this is a social network which is devoted to academia. It
offers the added benefit of being able to select areas of academic interest
which subsequently sorts and streams applicable content to the users. Site users are able to follow others in the
same fashion as Twitter. It provides
online tools to embed each user’s connection to other social networking tools
such as Twitter and LinkedIn. By using
this site to update and upload research and create links to other personal web
locations, the participants can easily acquire and practise some valuable
skills within an environment which makes sense to them.
In terms of promoting the digital footprint, social networks
tend to be ranked highly in Google search results, and Academia.edu is no
exception. Uploading links to one’s research to sites such as
Academia.edu and Google Scholar citations can increase SEO, which may then lead
to increased numbers of downloads, citations and take-up of the ideas described
in the papers. (Kelly, 2012) The
advantage of Academia.edu is that it’s a network that speaks the language of
academia. A defining feature is that your
profile URL is tied to the institution where you currently work; for example, sun.academia.edu/NoelleVanderWaagCowling (The
Higher Education Chronicle, Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics,
Feb 2011)
A final important feature is that Academia.edu will alert a
user when someone has searched for them and landed on their profile page. One
can track what searches people are using to find by looking at your keywords
page. This speaks to the outcome of
being able to assess your academic presence online.
Linkedin
“Within the business community, a LinkedIn profile is a must-have. Within academia, however, LinkedIn, a
networking site for professionals, is far from ubiquitous. In fact, Academia.edu is often touted—by itself
and others— as the academic alternative to LinkedIn.” (The Higher Education
Chronicle, Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics, Feb 2011)
Nevertheless across the group of participants partaking in
this project it was the one commonality between all of them. It makes sense therefore to make use of a
tool which everybody identifies with and one which they have obviously invested
time and effort using. In LinkedIn’s favour is the fact that it is so
widely used and that it enjoys great authority on Google. Interestingly a recent study in the UK by
Kelly points to the fact that LinkedIn is used by approximately 3 times more
academic staff than any other social networking platform (Facebook was not
considered in this study).
Slideshare
Speaking of LinkedIn brings us to Slideshare, the latter
having recently been acquired by LinkedIn. http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/03/linkedin-acquires-professional-content-sharing-platform-slideshare-for-119 As a result your Slideshare presentations
can now be seamlessly integrated on your LinkedIn site. Slideshare is a mammoth enterprise in its own
right, the online presentation warehouse boasts more than 30 million monthly
visitors. (http://patrickpowers.net/2010/11/three-ways-universities-could-better-use-slideshare)
Slideshare is a media sharing service. It differs from the other platforms in this
study because it is primarily a tool for sharing presentations and as such it
has a potentially powerful teaching application. It shares a space on the web with other media
sharing tools such as YouTube and Flickr.
Slideshare is powerful for a few reasons, firstly it encourages
academics to post and share their ideas, teaching and hopefully to carefully
consider the standard of their presentations.
Secondly because it promotes OER, lastly Slideshare serves as a social
discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other
members who share similar interests.
Slideshare therefor encourages a number of specific skills
towards digital literacy, such as sharing in OER practices, the potential to
integrate video and other media. “Media sharing has become an important example
of Web 2.0 practice that has emerged in the last five years or so. Users can
download and upload a variety of different types of media objects to the
Internet. These provide access to other OER and aim to engage users using
social networking and rating tools. Many
media sharing sites now incorporate mechanisms for peer rating and commentary
from users.” (Conole and Avenziou)
Twitter
Interestingly most members of the group felt somewhat ambivalent
or intimidated by Twitter. Many seem to
view it as a type of “Facebook Lite” and are unsure of what its benefits
are. This arises possibly from the
notion that one may not necessarily have something relevant to contribute or
sufficient to say in order to tweet five times a day. However, that Twitter is all about tweeting is a common misperception and it could be
argued that Twitter, for newbies at
least, is best used as a following tool.
Twitter brings two critical affordances. The first is as an aggregator of the latest information
in your field (if you’re following the thought leaders). The second is as a dissemination tool, most
academics are aware that the research process does not end with publication; ensuring
that your latest research gains traction is critical and Twitter is an excellent
tool for this. It is a good idea not to
use Twitter in isolation, but to link it in to an overall social media strategy
for example alongside blogging. (How
to...use Twitter for academic research http://www.emeraldinsight.com/research/guides/management/twitter.htm?part=3&PHPSESSID=pg9bpsuk442i6jcs20c4ghucs4)
Twitter can be confusing at first and the anticipated
returns can be underwhelming. There are
a number of dos and don’ts with Twitter and as a result it is being introduced
towards the end of my digital literacies project. It is best viewed as an incremental tool
which will take some time to gather steam.
New academic users on Twitter can perhaps profit more from utilising it
as a mechanism to find "signals" (up and coming trends or interesting
projects for example) about topics. (http://www.fashionunited.com/education/news/social-media-as-marketing-tool-for-academic-research-20122707489685) Twitter can therefore be instrumental in fostering
connections but also as a tool for following projects and research.
Google sites
The final step of the project is to assist members of the
group in creating an e-portfolio. After
extensive reading it was decided to use Google sites for this purpose. The entire Google echo system is robust and
offers various supporting technologies to support such an enterprise. The fairly new Google Scholar Citations tool which
can be embedded in such a portfolio also provides a very useful tool for
tracking research impact. Initially
Google+ and everything which accompanies it is not that intuitive to use for
neophytes and therefore it provides a good opportunity for learning in terms of
the digital literacy context. Google is
also an excellent platform because it provides almost unparralled collaboration
opportunities encompassing both research tools as well as teaching tools which
can all be wrapped and utilised within one echo system.
Google Sites offers users a
relatively simple way to create an e-portfolio. One can add content, file
attachments and information from other Google applications (like Google Docs,
Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa) with a click of a button. Google is also extremely scalable and
includes important add-ons such as blogs and Google education apps.
The advantages of Google Sites are:
• They are
easy to create.
• They are
completely free to set up and maintain.
• They do
not require HTML knowledge.
• They
provide customizable templates to personalize your portfolio. (Barrett on http://electronicportfolios.com/google)
Conclusion
Having selected these tools the main challenge ahead will
be implementing the roll out within the relatively short time frame
available. The second challenge will be
in measuring their use and impact within the group as the turn around time is
too short to gauge the actual impact.
However, this information can be gathered over time and hopefully utilised
in a follow on to the study.
