Skip to Main Content

Creating & Managing an Academic Profile

This guide focuses on skills and tools for discussing, interacting, presenting, writing, commenting, and finally publishing your research in the social networks used by academics.

Creating material specifically for an online audience has several benefits when building your online profile.  Blogs and websites can help your research reach a non-academic community, such as journalists, policy makers, and industry.  Videos and podcasts can highlight your public speaking and engagement skills. While this kind of profile development will take more time and effort to maintain than others, there are benefits to considering engaging in this way. 

Twitter

Twitter is a popular microblogging service.

The service provides access to current updates in your discipline, as news services and academic journals broadcast breaking news over Twitter. One distinct advantage of Twitter is the ability to reply to journalists and scholars in your field and to easily repost links to articles through your own account.  Twitter can be use in academia to:

  • Follow colleagues or research projects;
  • Post links to research papers;
  • Solicit advice on works-in-progress, ideas, or problems;
  • Create and follow custom newspapers out of Twitter content using paper.li

Example of Twitter Accounts

 

To learn about sharing your academic output using hashtags and Twitter lists, go to the Content Sharing tab.

Blogs

Blogs are a space where academics and scholars engaged in new ideas, begin discussions on research findings, and gain feedback on pre-published materials. Blogging gives academics the opportunity to expand the reach of their scholarship by presenting their work to a larger community. This builds opportunities for collaboration and potentially new publishing outputs. Additionally, blogging of research can provide academics with open discussion about their research, a form of interactive peer review that moves beyond the closed models currently supported in traditional publishing models.

Blogging Tools

UBC offers a weblogging platform run on the open-source software WordPress. Managed through the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTLT). UBC blogs can be created for courses, portfolios, research and publishing. To learn more about developing your own UBC blog, go to the following pages:

Blog Tools

There are several other blogging tools. You can find more options here: Best Blogging Platforms.

Examples of Blogs Used for Subject Engagement

Videos & Podcasts

A great deal of scholarly output is often difficult to capture. Lectures and conference presentations, while important modes of scholarly output, are not captured as effectively with written notes and presentation documents. Videos and podcasts allow you to capture:

  • presentations that may be dependent on audiovisual materials for expressing ideas
  • discussion periods that can add clarity to your work
  • nonverbal skills associated to effective presentation

Additionally, videos and podcasts can add to your instruction portfolio. You can develop instruction material in multiple formats and use the material as support for your own instruction and/or provide open access to a broader community. Open Education Resources (OER) are a good example of this kind of work.

Videos and podcasts are time-consuming to create, so consider working with a team to start a departmental/faculty series or collaborating with another campus unit or organization.

Audio and Video Editing Tools

While there are no workshops that address audio and video editing at this time, there are guides created by the Centre for Teaching and Learning to assist you in getting started.

Examples of Academic Videos

Examples of Academic Podcasting