My two young teenage daughters spend hours playing Minecraft, building elaborate virtual landscapes and structures. They are far from alone; the game has millions of fans around the world. Teachers are seizing on Minecraft’s popularity with kids as a tool to teach both abstract and concrete subjects. What’s unique about this situation is not so much […]
Category: Social Media
Impact Round-Up 18th January: #altmetrics mania, adjunct invisibility, and quantitative sociology at Facebook.
Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication. A sociologist working at facebook by Michael Corey at OrgTheory. Facebookers are heavily involved with academic pursuits…My own team (Growth … Continue reading →
The evolution of social networking sites: the rise of content-centric platforms which favour the perpetual present.
Socio-technical trends and their underlying theoretical perspectives shed light on likely developments in store for mediated communication. Vyacheslav Polonski finds that in the coming years, new design norms will overhaul current metaphors, marking a shift from profile-centric to content-centric interactions. In the … Continue reading →
Creating, curating and circulating research: our top five posts on Social Media
Social media has proven itself to be a useful tool for the wider dissemination of research. Our list of the top five posts from the past year includes an A-Z guide of using social media in academia and also critically explores the … Continue reading →
Twitter and traditional bibliometrics are separate but complementary aspects of research impact.
In a recent study, Haustein and colleagues found a weak correlation between the number of times a paper is tweeted about and subsequent citations. But the study also found papers from 2012 were tweeted about ten times more than papers from … Continue reading →
Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2013: The Battle for “Open”.
There are no simple answers to the growing demand for openness in relation to education technology and scholarly communication. Audrey Watters takes a look back at how the term ‘open’ has been discussed in the last year. As open continues … Continue reading →
From the precarious university to the rise and rise of social media: our most popular posts of 2013.
It has been a great year for the Impact of Social Sciences blog and we look forward to the exciting times ahead – particularly with the launch of our Research Book next month! But it wouldn’t be the new year without a … Continue reading →
As academic blogging becomes mainstream, science communication must facilitate depth and breadth in online discourse.
Having recently attended a conference session on the role of online forums for science communication, Alan Cann reflects on the extent to which academic blogging is currently embedded in academic practice. Blogs are still the centre of serious online academic communication … Continue reading →