Social Media & Academia Panel Session and Surgery (#socac) at Social Media Week Glasgow

Held on Wednesday 21st September 2011, 3:30pm to 6:00pm, at Level 12, University of Glasgow Library, Hillhead Street, Glasgow , G12 8QE

Jen Ross, Chris Speed, William Nixon, Heather Rea and Peter Matthews at #socac event

This panel discussion, co-organised by EDINA and Edinburgh Beltane, Beacon for Public Engagement focused on the opportunities for using social media in academia, particularly for public engagement where collaboration and communicating research to wider audience can create greater social impact for your work.

Our panellists were:

• Dr Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor), lecturer in the School of the Built Environment, Heriot-Watt University
• William Nixon (@williamjnixon), Digital Library Development Manager at the University of Glasgow
• Dr Chris Speed (@chrisspeed), researcher in Digital Architecture, Human Geography and Social Computing, Edinburgh College of Art
• Jen Ross (@JAR), Associate Lecturer on the MSc in E-Learning programme and part of the Digital Cultures and Education research group at the School of Education, University of Edinburgh.

The discussion was chaired by Heather Rea, Project Manager for Edinburgh Beltane, Beacon for Public Engagement with liveblogging and support for the amplified audience by Nicola Osborne, Social Media Officer for EDINA.

Nicola Osborne liveblogged the day.

Programme

3:30	Live poll: What do you currently use Social Media for? Get a free sms student response system at Poll Everywhere
3:35	Introductions from Heather Rea (@edBeltane), Edinburgh Beltane Beacon for Public Engagement & Nicola Osborne (@suchprettyeyes), EDINA Introductory Presentation:
3:40	Meet the panelists! Introductions from who they are and how they are using social media - Dr Peter Matthews's introduction was via a video Social Media & Academia Introduction from Peter Matthews on Vimeo.
4.30	Opening Questions
4:40	Questions open up to the floor – what do you want to ask our panelists?
6:00	Close

Originally we had planned to host a social media surgery from 5pm to 6pm but on the day there was greater interest in continuing the question and answer session and discussions instead.

The hashtag for the event was #socac - tweets were shown before the event and several questions from Twitter were discussed during the event. Please do tweet to the same hashtag if you have any comments on this topic or on the liveblog or audio recording of this session.

Links

• SMW Glasgow Event Page
• #socac TwapperKeeper Archive and Storify timeline
• LiveBlog of the event
• Event photographs
• Full mp3 audio recording of the event:

Write Ups by attendees:

• Social Media and Academia
  Sheila MacNeill, Assistant Director of JISC CETIS
• Social Media in Education: The Good, The Bad and The Unintentional
  Jeremy Knox, ESRC-funded PhD student researching elearning and critical posthumanism