Professor Richard Holliman, The Open University. Credit: Jane Perrone.
Digital media are changing researchers’ roles and simultaneously providing a route for a more engaging relationship with stakeholders throughout the research process. But are they work?
Over the last couple of years I’ve been working with colleagues at the Open University (Ann Grand, now at the University of Western Australia, Trevor Collins and Anne Adams) to explore this issue and how it relates to questions of strategy, operational practices, training, support, and reward and recognition (Holliman et al., 2015).
In attempting to address the overarching question of whether social media are work, we recently published a paper arising from one aspect of a project exploring how university research and professional practices are evolving as researchers engage with stakeholders via digital media to create, share and represent knowledge together (Grand et al., 2016).
In that paper we review the extent to which they are developing multiple identities and functions in their engaged research through digital media. You can access the paper from the following link:
“We muddle our way through”: shared and distributed expertise in digital engagement with research
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