Calling All Social Media Types!

Our very own Ross Parry has just requested that I highlight this workshop that's taking place on Thursday. Do attend, if you're able, because everyone would be really pleased to see you! It's free, and if you're traveling any distance, then accommodation and expenses, within reason, can be covered.

Come, have fun, if social media is your thing. And given that you're reading this blog, it may well be...

A RESEARCHER’S GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA AND CULTURAL HERITAGE
A one-day ‘SkillsCamp’
funded by the AHRC

Learning Studio, School of Museum Studies,
Museum Studies Building, University of Leicester, LE1 7RF
10.00am-4.30pm, Thursday 9 December 2010

AIM

The aim of this event is to bring researchers, practitioners and trainers together to share experience and identify best practice of working with social media in research and heritage contexts. Through a series of activities (and use case scenarios) together we will explore the social Web as a research environment, as a data source and as an object of study.

The SkillsCamp has particular resonance for anyone working with digital media and cultural heritage (‘digital heritage’), but will also be of relevance and use to any researchers using or studying social media.

Refreshments and lunch are provided.

**And we are pleased to announced that all travel and accommodation costs of all participants will be covered by the partnership**

REGISTRATION

To book your place at this SkillsCamp, simply contact Dr. Ross Parry (Academic Director, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester) on rdp5@le.ac.uk.

PROGRAMME

10.00-10.30 – arrival and coffee

10.30-11.00 – introductions – What’s my relationship to social media and to cultural heritage?

11.00-12.00 – Mapping exercise - What are the researcher’s challenges with social media? And what are the strategies that we are all developing to help us overcome these challenges?

12.00-12.45 – Lunch provided

12.45-1.45 - Use Case 1: The social Web as research environment.
My research profile and visibility in the social Web - how do I network and communicate my research? What do I put into the social Web?

1.45-2.45 - Use Case 2: The social Web as data resource.
What can we use from the social Web? What can the social Web give me as a researcher? How do I work ethically within social media?

2.45-3.00 Tea break

3.00-4.00 - Use Case 3: The social Web as subject
How do I study social media? What methodological tools and theoretical frameworks can I use to understand the social Web?

4.00-4.30 - Wrap-up

BACKGROUND

Over the last two years the Universities of Leicester, Newcastle, Glasgow and Manchester have been collaborating, with project partner The Collections Trust on the ‘Digital Heritage Research Training Initiative’. This partnership, funded under the AHRC’s Collaborative Research Training call, has allowed these institutions to design and produce a series of online research skills units (with accompanying teacher/supervisor/trainer notes) targeted at researchers working with digital media in heritage contexts.

Drawing upon the partnership’s experience of producing distance learning materials, the eight units (each between 8,000-10,000 words, structured around a series of activities and discussions, and each representing around 14 hours of study time) cover subjects such as: ‘Disseminating your research with digital media’; ‘Harnessing the digital heritage community as a research tool’; ‘Using social media in research’; ‘Tools for evaluating museum websites’; and ‘Finding and using heritage databases’.

In producing these research skills units, the aim of the initiative has been to bring together the expertise of these institutions to help meet the new skills requirements of a new generation of researchers working in the emergent areas of digital heritage.

In the New Year these units will be made available online (for free use) by the Collections Trust.

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