Are you TikTok Ready?

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been diving into TikTok, lecturing about it, writing, and trying to figure out what space there is for scholars to be present. It’s not a simple one to solve, but I think we need to understand how the consumption of media content is changing and so I put this at the heart of this article for the Times Higher. More writing on this to follow, but here’s the link to the article.

Athlete 365

A few years ago, I developed a course for Olympic athletes, as part of the International Olympic Committee learning initiative. I’m delighted to say that I’ll be developing a new version of this, which will feature all things digital. As a teaser, check out this Dos and Donts list for using social media as an athlete.

Sport 2.0 #sportfuture

This week, I am in Lausanne for the Sport Future Rendezvous 2016 conference, organized by good friend Professor Jean-Loup Chappelet at the University of Lausanne. I took the chance to talk about the biodigital interface, the growth of e-sport, biotechnological change, ingestible sensors, and virtual realities. But the big controversy, as always, was my views around doping, which did hijack the futures debate a little. In any case, here's my presentation.

 Thanks to Michel Filliau for the photograph.

IAAF World Junior Championships

This week, I am at the IAAF World Junior Chamionships in the USA to give social media training to athletes. Other trainers include the former world champion sprinter Ato Boldon, Olympic champion Joanna Hayes, and Canada's legendary Charmaine Crooks. Very excited Here's the programme: • Introduction and moderator Charmaine Crooks • The dos and don’ts of social media Professor Andy Miah • Being an Olympic champion – how to cope with the media’s pressure Joanna Hayes • Athletics and television – opportunities and perspectives Ato Boldon Followed by media training and questions & answers

What's trending at #ECSS2014?

In July, I ran a social media and sport workshop at #ECSS2014. Here's a video made from the congress, where I talk a bit about social media...

And here's the prezi from the workshop...

Social Media in Teaching & Learning [VIDEO]

A video I produced for @UWScreative.

Social Media & Academic Life [VIDEO]

A video talk for Taylor & Francis Group, Australia journal Editors' roundtable event.

Everything Everywhere: An Academic's Life on Social Media [VIDEO]

My talk for Taylor & Francis about how academics can use social media to increase the impact of their work.

Social Media & Cities: Strategy

Today at the Sport Accord Convention, I am taking part in a session on social media and cities. Find below some of my key messages

Three key messages:

1. Take stock of the media ecology around your city. Do some research. It is nearly a decade since all of the major social media platforms were launched. Figure out what’s been going on and identify three layers of access 1) popular 2) unusual 3) niche. Ideally, think about what kind of tools you can deveop as city or help others develop around your city. For instance, during London 2012, the mobile app integrated activity from across a range of stakeholders.
2. What are the unique ways in which a sports event can promote cities via social media? During London 2012, hashtags were used in venues to promote engagement with the sport, but what about the streets? One interesting cultural programme used ‘pop up’ events that drew on social media exclusively for communications. Cities are busy places, especially during mega events. A conventional marketing programme can actually lead to too many people and, in this era of social media, the value of spontaneous experiences has grown. People like to feel they saw something amazing just by chance. Social media does this. Your audiences will be just as big, but you will reach different people.
3. How can sports inhabit cities through social media? The day after the cycling road race at London 2012, the IOC Comms director Mark Adams asked fans to limit their use of 3g, as it interfered with their monitoring of the race. How can your city be aware of these needs early enough. Create an ‘innovation lab’ within your city and within your organization to stay ahead of the curve.

Other considerations

1. Embed a pro-social media policy into your organization. Don’t discourage using facebook at work, just talk to staff about whether they think it is a distraction and try to manage it.
2. Train people – that starts with the CEO. Social media is best promoted when leaders figure out its value. So, if you have a smart phone, take it out now. put  it on silent. Open the native twitter app and set up your account, twitting #SAcon13
3. People first, institution second. While people do like to follow an official account, they also like making contact with key people, so think about how you empower your staff to be active.
4. Identify your key agitators. A lot of activity can be generated from a small number of dedicated followers.  The recent horrific incident in London where a soldier was butchered in the street was seen as a watershed moment in the history of citizen journalism. In this case, the perpetrators sought citizens to share what was going on, not the BBC, not a newspaper. Your citizens are your media.

London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Social Media Evaluation (2013)

Miah, A. (2013) London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Social Media Data Analysis, Institute of Cultural Capital.  

The top findings are:

• The #London2012festival Twitter hashtag was a gateway for over 500 cultural
• organizationsto promote themselves during 2012.
• The key drivers of London 2012 Festival social media activity were LOCOG Twitter
• accounts (organization and individual).
• Some of the smallest arts organizations(in terms of social media presence) in the UK
• produced some of the largest amount of social media traffic eg. Lakes Alive.
• Ruth Mackenzie was the second-most mentioned individual on #London2012Festival,
• after Yoko Ono, demonstrating the value of personalized leadership in social media
• relations.
• Across the social media assets, @London2012Fest reached the same degree of influence
• as Arts Council England (each had 66 Klout1
• score) and exceeded them in terms of
• absolute followers (over 42,000, which was more than Jonnie Peacock’s Twitter account
• by the end of the Paralympic Games.
• The @London2012Fest twitter account was the largest Cultural Olympiad brand on
• social media.
• The primary London 2012 Twitter assets (eg. @London2012 or @SebCoe) worked well for
• London 2012 Festival in advance of the Games, but were not optimally sharing content
• for Festival during the Games.
• Collectively, projects associated with London 2012 Festival created new communities of
• arts audiences, though Festival was not always visually ortextually associated with the
• project.
• Outdoor, mass spectacle events were the most successful in terms of social media traffic.
• With the exception of the Guardian, traditional media did not do very much to promote
• London 2012 Festival through social media.
• The @London2012Fest twitter account was the second most followed LOCOG identity,
• after @London2012, exceeding the follower count of both mascots.

Can Twitter open up a new space for learning, teaching and thinking?

A new piece written by Emma Rich and I follows a twitter seminar we ran a couple of weeks ago. Here's what we learned.

Social Learning 2.0: A New Teaching Ethos for Universities

Social Learning 2.0: A New Teaching Ethos for Universities

by

Dr Emma Rich, University of Bath (@emmarich45)

&

Professor Andy Miah, University of the West of Scotland

Around the end of 2011, a few geeks in Sweden set up the Swedish Twitter University, which brought lectures in a series of tweets to a class of, at least, around 500 followers. It may have been the first time that Twitter was used to deliver higher education and with the recent debates about massive open online courses (MOOCs), it seems apt that we reflect on what Twitter might do to transform the classroom and open up a new space for public education?

This week, we put together an experiment that tested these limits, creating a seminar that took place entirely within Twitter, using a bespoke hashtag to bring together all of the content. Running a seminar in Twitter might sound like a relatively simple exercise: ensure students have devices through which to tweet (mostly their own, but if not then a computer or loaner, or share), then position your Visiting Professor - aka Andy Miah - in front of his computer and let rip.

There was a bit of prep time involved too. Emma was in the classroom, doing some pre-reading and preparation with the students, who were all in the same place. They need not have been, but this introduces an interesting debate: is there something to gain by being ‘Alone Together’ as Sherry Turkle would say. While mobile devices can allow us to remove the physical classroom all together, there value may be analogous to going to the cinema or watching television. Both involve watching a movie, but there’s some additional value in the physical, shared experience. In this case, not by design, but more by last minute planning, the students were all together. They also watched a livestream of all tweets, introducing an additional dimension to the experience - literally a silver screen of collective content. The session was pitched as a Q&A based on something Andy had written and over 40 minutes around 110 tweets flew through cyberspace.

Did it work? Was there much gained by this experience? Did the students get anything more - or less - than they would have, if they had just had Andy in the room giving them a talk? This is a difficult question to answer, but it was certainly different and, you could argue that universities need to prepare their students for communication in the ultra fast lane of social media.

This Twitter seminar gave students the rare opportunity to ask questions and post comments to Andy through tweets and receive individual replies. You can read the discussion via storify, here . The method encouraged reciprocity, instinctive thinking and recognised a shift in how education takes place in the 21st century, from a reliance on formal education to a recognition of spaces like social media as important sites for learning. This unique social media event gave the students an opportunity to experience public pedagogy first hand, in addition to developing their own sense of working within the public domain, a crucial skill in a world of 24-hour connectivity.

Spontaneity and immediacy are of course seen as some of the celebrated strengths of social media like twitter. Consider its role for example in alerting the public of information or news about significant events such as natural disasters before it even breaks in the mainstream. Responding in the twitter debate, within seconds, students were receiving replies from Andy and thinking on their feet.  But conveying a message in 140 characters is challenging, particularly if one wants to avoid over simplification in complex, critical debate. Do we prepare students well for this? Quick thinking and summarising you views carries potential risk which for many means a fear of ‘tweeting’ and putting critical views in the public domain.

Just this week, the BBC published an article on Twitter users: A guide to the law, which suggests that ordinary social media users need to have a grasp of media law. Through the defamation bill and other laws, it may be clearer to us what we can and can’t say on platforms like twitter.  Perhaps clearer social media law will offer both staff and students clarity and confidence in engaging with social media in the classroom. However, this law doesn’t of course address issues of reciprocity, etiquette, or how we make ‘cold’ connections in the networked world.

If the Twitter debate hadn’t been facilitated in a formal capacity, many of the students would not felt it appropriate to contact a Professor (or other ‘esteemed’ twitter user) in the way they did during the debate. We do not know the future of these emerging technologies and so ‘demarcation and rules’ do not seem so fruitful here. Fluidity, flexibility and responsiveness seem like important skills for students to develop as part of their learning. Apart from anything else, it’s a great way to bring some additional life into lectures and encourage students to think about their online presence; something they inevitably will have, but which is usually separate from their learning.

The A to Z of Social Media for Academia