relection #2

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.