Slides for a workshop I did with Sara Barker in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge in July 2018.

1. PUBLISHING IN AN AGE
OF SOCIAL MEDIA

2. BEYOND JOURNALS, EDITED BOOKS AND MONOGRAPHS
OTHER PLATFORMS FOR PUBLISHING
• The growing acceptance of
social media within the
academy
• The three challenges of social
media for academics: how
much time do you have, who
are your audience and how to
take advantage without being
overwhelmed?
• Using social media to make
your work public: work in
progress and/or finished work.
Each has different risks and
advantages.

3. SO WHO ARE YOUR PUBLIC?
PUBLISHING AS ‘MAKING PUBLIC’
• Who are your audience? (Your field, your
discipline, practitioners, policy makers,
activists?)
• Social media as a way of building
connections with them. What social media
do they use and how will you connect with
them?
• What can you share with them that will be
of interest to them? What are you reading,
thinking about, struggling with or
accomplishing for your research? Takes
time and energy but lays the groundwork
• Established blogs provide an audience
which you can access as part of a quid pro
quo: which blogs do you read? Do they
accept contributions?
• What are you trying to say? Who are you
trying to say it to? Why are you publishing?

4. SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
• What social media platforms do you use? What do other academics you know
use?
• Different platforms can be used to produce the same kind of output e.g. videos
on YouTube or Vimeo, pinboards on Pinterest or Padlet.
• Therefore we focus on outputs. How to link up ‘old’ and ‘new’?
1. Announcing your publications through social media
2. Summarising your publications through social media
3. Contextualising your publications through social media
4. Constituting your publications through social media
• Not enough time to focus on each platform but if you’re clear about what
you’re doing and why, it will be easier to get to grips with platforms.

5. (AND HOW WILL YOU LINK IT ALL TOGETHER)
SO WHAT IS IT YOU’RE GOING TO PUBLISH?
Traditional Output Emerging Output
Chapter Tweet
Essay Blog Post
Review Podcast
Paper Videocast
Book Graphic
Other Pin board
In pairs:
• Take one card each and discuss
a potential output of that type
from your current research
• Repeat the process until you
have at 5 output ideas each
• Can you arrange them into a
timeline?
E.g. I’ll tweet about research looking at measurement
of social media impact, write up a blog post to
produce provisional findings, include this as a topic in
the book I’m writing and then focus on it in a podcast
which will help the book.
Will you share your imagined
timeline?

6. WHO ARE YOU AS A RESEARCHER?
• Academic CV and publications list as a
form of writing about the self
• Social media platform profiles come
with their own restrictions
• What can you communicate through
social media profiles? What do you
want to communicate? Can anyone
suggest examples to look at?
• Have you checked your digital
footprint? What story might others tell
about you? Crucial for media,
practitioners, policy makers etc
• Why does your research matter to
you? How do you tell a story about
this? Social media rewards authenticity

7. KEY QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
• How much time and energy
can you put into social media?
• How much of your research
are you comfortable sharing
before it is published?
• Who is the audience for what
you are sharing? How will you
ensure they are interested?
• What risks do you perceive in
sharing in this way? Do you
need to take steps to mitigate
them?