Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Peps Mccrea
professional engagement. You start to share some things you have come across, even
have a few conversations with the people you follow. You want more.
2. Engaged
My first suggestion is that when participating through social media, the combination of affordances
can lead to a heightened sense of academic engagement. These affordances include:
Asynchronous communication enabling both a high degree of time-to-reflect flexibility and
potentially permanently open conversations
Blogging as a creative endeavour offering an active, satisfying and sustainable form of
professional development (Mackey and Evans 2011)
Ideas-oriented conversation providing an intellectually fertile environment in contrast to
predominantly outcomes-oriented organisational set-ups where dialogue can often be tempered
by managerial and political interference
How does this 'fit' with current institutional dialogues? Davies and Merchant (2007) argue that social
media enriches offline relationships: that in addition to fundamentally changing how we write and
communicate, it also changes how and with who we interact, including those with which we share our
working days. In an unexpected twist, could this change in local practice be its most significant impact
of academic blogging in HE?
You find Wordpress and spend days choosing a title. You consider your first post. What
story do you have the authority to tell? There are so many people blogging. How can you
contribute to the conversation? It’s a bit daunting. But then, so was Twitter initially.
You come across one blog post that really gets you going. You comment but there is
more you want to say. You realise that this is your first blog post. You want to be a bigger
part of this conversation.
It takes ages. Your best writing. You click ‘publish’. Not much happens. You exposed
your thinking to the world and nothing happened! You find yourself seeing things in terms
of your next blog post. Someone says something interesting at lunch and you make a
note in your iPhone.
You write a few more posts. One is actually quite interesting. This time when you tweet
about it, @timbuckteeth picks it up and tweets about it. Suddenly you are exposed to 10
000 people! Two of them comment on your post. A bunch of people follow you. And then
a couple more next day. Cool.
3. Exposed
My second suggestion is that academics who contribute via social media encounter a form of
increased conceptual exposure that is not normally afforded by contemporary professional
development. Combining norms of periodic self-disclosure and risk-taking with limited audience
control (Davies and Merchant 2007), blogging has compelled me to regularly and publically explicate
my self, my thinking and my position on live as well as age-old issues.
However, with exposure comes vulnerability. Recent Twitter flurries (think footballer) have highlighted
how social media can destroy professional reputations within hours. Krikup (2010) suggests that it
may be safer to practice a genre of writing that is less likely to bring you into potential conflict with
your employer. Public exposure is not something all academics or institutions will be comfortable,
particularly if practising any form of institutional critique.
You begin to rethink how you blog. The academic style of writing. You think about your
use of social media. Is it okay to check Twitter at work? You begin to think about how
much you are learning. You wonder why more people aren’t doing this.
You write a blog post about a paper you have read. The author comments on your blog
post. You reply. You are having a conversation with someone you read! Wow. Why aren’t
you having more of these conversations at work? You feel engaged in academic thinking.
All the time.
You wonder about blogging as a form of scholarly activity. You begin to see commenting
as a kind of peer review and blogging as a kind of open access reporting. You think
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