Stories from the Faculty Blogosphere
By Karl Leif Bates
Durham, NC -- The popular coinage "social media" would have been an oxymoron only five years ago.
Back then, "media" was a giant megaphone that broadcast information only one way and "social" was being in the same room with other people. Today, everyone is "the media," and we don't even have to be in the same time zone to be social.
While they may take some getting used to, the new tools of social media can be a wonderful way to teach for scholars who used to broadcast (often one-way) to a room full of flesh-and-blood students, according to four social media experts assembled on Sept. 17 to coach about 70 Duke faculty.
The workshop was organized by Duke's Office of News and Communications and the Center for Information Technology.
"Blogging is an ideal forum for scholarly communication," said Laurent Dubois, the Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History. Dubois said he started using blogs only about a year ago as a virtual class discussion for his sections on soccer and politics, Haiti and contemporary France. But he quickly saw how the tool added the ability to bring in outside sources of information and have engaging class discussions round the clock.
And his personal dispatches from the World Cup in South Africa led to an invitation to write a commentary for CNN.
"I take risks on my blog," Dubois said. "It's a relief, frankly, to be able to change voices."
Rather than being a distraction from his scholarly duties, contemporary social critic and New Black Man Mark Anthony Neal, sees his social media output as central to his efforts to bring scholarship to a wider audience.
"After a decade of writing for a broader audience, I see myself as a public intellectual," said Neal, a professor of African & African American Studies and a regular columnist on the site Loop 21.com. Neal has become pretty much a one-man social media movement. He maintains three blogs, and also connects with the world through Facebook and Twitter. He recently started a weekly YouTube show, "Left of Black."
He started using Facebook because he found students were ignoring his emails and Twitter (just this year) because he found "alumni still wanting to have the Mark Anthony Neal experience." Now the two sites serve as drivers to bring people to his blog posts, "the home base," where longer, more thoughtful work appears.
Neal is publishing his scholarship digitally and in a timely fashion, and the audience is as wide as it wants to be. "The technology has caught up to my ambitions."
"This sounds like 'knowledge in service to society,' " said moderator David Jarmul, associate vice president for news and communications.
Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English, blogs, tweets and posts, but spent most of her portion of the panel extolling the connectivity of Twitter. The 140-character bursts from her Twitter connections has almost entirely replaced traditional media for her, and has saved, not consumed, her time, she said. "Twitter is the most efficient thing I do in my day," she said.
The mini-posts themselves, called "tweets," don't say much in themselves -- "it's like Haiku," she said. But the best tweets contain links to larger resources, and by watching trusted streams of updates and passing things along to her own followers, Twitter becomes a new way of staying current, Davidson said. "I use Twitter as my filter on the news. It's a great way of receiving and sending information, but it requires commitment."
The other payoff, Davidson said, was the sense of connectedness and community that social media gives her. Her posts garner immediate feedback and spark interesting discussions.
Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy assistant professor Misha Angrist, aka the blogger GenomeBoy, said blogging doesn't have to feel like homework. In fact, he took a break from blogging for a while when it started to feel burdensome, and now he has found a happy balance where he blogs about things he knows about ,when and where he feels like it. "I've managed to find a way to do this and not go crazy or have it take over my life." Angrist recently joined the ranks of PLoS Blogs, a new family of science bloggers hosted by the Public Library of Science open access journals.
"You don't have to worry about it becoming overwhelming because you can control how much you do it," Dubois added
Lynne O'Brien and her staff from the Center for Instructional Technology showed faculty how they too could easily use Facebook, Twitter and WordPress blogs and answered questions from the technical to the philosophical. Their tutorials can be found at cit.duke.edu/blog/2010/09/17/socialmediaworkshop/ or you can see what participants thought of the session, as it happened, by checking the hashtag #dukesocial on Twitter. (Or just click here to execute a Twitter search on that tag.
