Jan 11, 2010
Building your academic profile online
On Wednesday, Lorraine Warren and I will be running a School Forum at the University of Southampton on the topic of building digital presence and its increasing importance as an academic profile. The slides are here:
I suspect that some of the audience will be sceptical, so I thought I’d use this blogpost to supplement our discussions and present some support for our case 
In an interesting presentation last year, Martin Weller of the Open University claimed that the time will come when our online identity is indistinguishable from our academic identity – that is simply how academics will be defined. The various tools that we now use to build and manage our digital presence can be mixed and matched to suit the particular needs of the individual, so online identity is distributed across a range of platforms which can then be shared and integrated in a variety of ways – in my case I mainly use Twitter, Slideshare and Delicious, all co-ordinated through this blog. Everyone’s online identity is therefore unique and their work can be widely distributed to a range of different audiences, and then informed and enhanced by feedback from these networks.
Martin goes on to discuss the growing IMPACT of online activity, where the reach of every individual blogpost can be calculated in terms of the number of its readers and the quality of feedback received in the form of comments and links to related work. Similarly, a Slideshare profile will showcase not just the content of the presentations that individual has posted, but also how many readers each presentation has had, and how many people have commented on that work or marked it as a favourite. It is not difficult to accumulate impact in this way that far exceeds the readership of my published academic articles, which I usually have to apologise for as out of date before they even see the light of day…
I plan to this post with feedback from the session on Wednesday (assuming I escape in one piece…)
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by lisaharris: My Blog: Building your academic profile online http://bit.ly/6h2ZsD...
That day is definitely coming, and coming soon. Best we all start thinking about it.
While I largely agree with what is contained in the slide presentation, and in fact have actively worked to develop a strong online academic presence for a few years now, the focus on 'brand' is sufficient to dissuade many members of the academy to take up advice such as what you've given. I'm a doctoral student and so I assumed that many of my peers would be more receptive to establishing open online environments where they could brand or identify themselves, but many are repulsed by any notion that they should develop a 'brand' for themselves. This reaction is paralleled by many faculty members (e.g. I'm already established, why should I both with social media and website nonsense when I can publish in journals instead?). Perhaps this is just my experience, but I have my doubts.
One thing that I think is particularly critical is to actually explain what 'authentic' means, and how to leverage something like a blog to get ideas out in a non-academic language – what suggestions would you offer the philosophy professor working on metaphysics of time, or a social scientists talking about health and war, or a mathematician doing what they do (is it obvious that I have a humanities/social sciences background? *grin*)?
I mention this latter point because I regularly am assailed by colleagues with 'you're doing X, which lends itself to developing an online profile, whereas no one cares about Y, which is what I do'. Moreover, there is a persistent worry and fear amongst my colleagues of people 'stealing' ideas that are posted online to blog, with the notion that you should only publish in journals to avoid such intellectual 'theft'.
Perhaps these are all issues that will come out in your talk. Many they deviate from the aim of your talk a little too much. It's just that these are the prevalent issues that I'm having in trying to explain the value of having an online social presence that develops a personal brand when speaking with colleagues, most of whom are doctoral students about to finish, or young faculty.
Hi Christopher, many thanks for your comments. Some of the points you mention were indeed raised in our workshop
The one about theft of intellectual property when posting presentations on Slideshare, for instance…my response was that any one can copy from a journal article too, but they will be distinguished by being at least two years out of date 
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