Tagged / blogging

Creative Writing for Academics with Kip Jones

BU research, PG research, Research news, Uncategorized

A two-day FREE workshop in creative writing with Kip Jones for Bournemouth University staff and students only.

Writing week: Wednesday 3 Jan and Thursday 4 Jan.

Wed: 9:30 – 3:30

Thurs 9:30 – 12:30 (followed by lunch at La Piccola Italia)

Executive Business Centre, 7th Floor

Places are limited, but the workshop is free. Please express your interest by emailing Kip asap. You will be expected to attend for both days, and attend the lunches. You are asked to buy your own refreshments and lunches, but we will eat together at a restaurant each day. The first day we will go to the International Centre next to EBC for lunch. The second day, we will have a concluding longer lunch at La Piccola Italia Restaurant, near EBC. Writing is a very solitary endeavor. Sharing of experiences and conviviality are important components of a balanced approach.

Summary: The Creative Writing workshop will be a unique event in that it will not be a typical ‘writing retreat’ (with trees to hug and lots of time to ruminate), but rather a very active experience with lots of exercises, suggestions and supportive feedback on participants’ work from Kip Jones and other participants.  The point is to encourage both students and academics who would like to include more creative writing in their outputs, particularly those whose writing includes reporting on narrative and other qualitative methods of research.  It also helps immensely in the move to publishing in the wider world of blogs and online outlets, moving work to media and film, auto-ethnography and even fiction.
Justification: The important point of Creative Writing for Academics is to help academics and students achieve the goal of seeing more of their work read by wider audiences; in other words, impact. By providing an intense two-day experience for participants to engage in developing writing skills, the playing field is levelled and opportunities for facilitated learning developed. By engaging in creative writing, it becomes possible for all to write more clearly, more simply, even more creatively, when writing not only for academic publications, but also for outlets previously unimagined.

Methods: The workshop will present opportunities to work with academic material and expand its means of production and dissemination to new and creative levels through interfaces with techniques from the arts and humanities, including blog and magazine writing, film treatments and scripts, and poetry and fictional exercises. These intellectual exchanges encourage joint exploration of how researchers can engage with principles and tools from the arts in order to expand and extend the possibilities of dissemination of research data. Concepts of creativity itself will evolve and be transformed by participants’ outlooks and willingness to engage with unfamiliar territory. These processes comprise ‘facilitated learning’—in that knowledge will be gained as a secondary goal through a process of developing new relationships through small group problem-solving and self examination, grounded in personal past experience and knowledge.

Promote your research internally by contributing to the BU Research Blog

Research news

Blogging is an excellent way to share your research, reach new audiences and join new networks (see my previous blog post ‘The benefits of academic blogging – should you enter the blogosphere?‘). You can add your own posts to the BU Research Blog to promote your research internally and as the BU Research Blog is available externally then you get the added benefit of reaching external audiences too. Here are some top tips for contributing to the Blog:

1. Figure out what it is you want to blog about

You may be a researcher wanting to share your research findings, or you may want to raise your profile or find new collaborators. Maybe you’ve read something really exciting about HE policy or research in your discipline and want to share it? It may be that you may want to comment on one of the topical research discussions going on in the sector (such as open access). Whatever your reason for wanting to blog, think about who you want to reach with your writing – be it potential collaborators, potential employers, or people on the street.

2. Get access

If you don’t already have access to contribute to the Blog then contact Rhyannan Hurst in RKEO and she will set you up with an account.

3. Write good headlines

If you want people to read what you’ve written, you’ll have to make them want to. Don’t fall into the trap of typing up any old headline and hitting publish after spending ages polishing the blog post itself. Always ask yourself if you’d click on a link based solely on the headline (and be honest). If you wouldn’t, change it.

Descriptive headlines that tell a reader exactly what to expect often work well. You should think about getting key words in there, but don’t fret too much about search engine optimisation. It’s more important to make actual humans want to read your work.

Google Analytics shows us that the most popular posts on the BU Research Blog are those with interesting and sometimes bizarre headlines!

4. Use the internet properly

Remember to add links to sources, news articles and other people’s blog posts in your own. Use images or video when they are a better way to communicate than words.

And, thanks to the unlimited space online, you don’t have a word count. But as well as giving you the space to go in-depth when you want to, it means you can write short if the subject doesn’t need a dissertation-length exploration. Don’t write an essay just because you can.

5. Promote your blog post

After publishing your blog post then you should shout about it, ideally using social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Don’t be afraid to send the post directly to certain people who you think will be interested in it.

These have been adapted from Kelly Oakes, Science Editor of BuzzfeedUK’s blog post on ‘How to Start a Science Blog‘.

Increasing publication impact – Using social media, e.g. Twitter, blogs, YouTube, social networking, etc.

Guidance

Twitter – Twitter is a micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as ‘tweets’. Academics are increasingly promoting their research papers via Twitter, which are then picked up by other researchers and practitioners. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Twitter allows you to set up search terms to enable you to monitor what is being talked about in your areas of interest. You can then comment on the relevant conversations. The more you engage, the more people will follow you to listen to your comments and recommendations. As followers come to you, rather than you approaching them, Twitter is an ideal way to reach new audiences.

Research indicates that highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than less-tweeted articles. Top-cited articles can be predicted from top-tweeted articles, with 93% specificity and 75% sensitivity (Eysenbach, 2011).

There are some excellent guides available on how to use Twitter for research projects, such as:

SAGE’s guidelines for how to use Twitter are available here: http://www.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdfs/twitterguidelines.pdf

BU guidelines on how to use Twitter are available here: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2012/01/19/get-tweeting-using-twitter-for-research-projects/

LSE Impact of Social Sciences guidelines on using Twitter are available here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/29/twitter-guide/

Paul Hughes from our M&C department is currently offering workshops to BU academics on how to get started with Twitter – read more here: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2012/05/16/twitter-for-research-academics/

 

Blogs – Academics who blog about their research regularly report positive outcomes, such as networking and collaboration, finding new audiences and opportunities, disseminating research more widely, increasing citations and downloads, and building reputation. Bloggers argue that far from diluting scholarly success (as has been suggested by some academics), online writing can be a serious tool for academic practice. Blogging should be seen as part of a programme of dissemination and collaboration, and is best used alongside traditional academic outlets (such as journals) as a means of amplifying the reach, and potentially the significance and future direction, of the research. Research indicates that blogging about a research paper causes a large increase in the number of abstract views and downloads in the same month (McKenzie and Ozler, 2011).

Rather than setting up a personal blog, BU academics can add posts about their research to the BU Research Blog. The BU Research Blog is visible to a global audience and is searchable by search engines, such as Google. Good post topics could include:

  • Your area of research and papers that you have published – and/or other related papers in your field of research. Link to the full-text article/DOI for maximum impact.
  • Conferences and training events that you’re due to speak at.
  • Your last conference – were there any interesting questions that came up?
  • Your opinions about any recent press coverage of your subject area.
  • You can also ask your colleagues and co-researchers to add posts to the Blog and comment on your own posts to stimulate debate.

 All staff at BU can have access to add their own posts to the Research Blog. Just email me and I will set you up with access.

 

YouTube – Visual content accessed on sites such as YouTube is increasingly popular, particularly with students. The publisher Sage reports seeing an increasing amount of traffic to their journal sites via YouTube as students use video as an initial way of researching a topic. Many publishers are now embracing YouTube, for example the Sage YouTube channel is a collection of videos, primarily by academics, about Sage journal articles. BU has a YouTube channel and M&C are able to film short videos of academics discussing their research. These videos can then be used in multiple places to maximise impact. Watch Alan Fyall’s video below as an example:

httpv://youtu.be/RvR3fFDrTLQ

 

Join academic social networking sites – Academics are increasingly using social networking sites to meet and converse with people who share similar research interests. Examples include: MyNetResearch, Academia and Academici. On these sites you can see what other people are discussing and what issues are pertinent in your field of research. If you have undertaken research in these areas then you can contribute and share your research findings, which in turn should increase the citations/downloads of your work.

Twitter tips for academics

Guidance

We’ve posted a number of times on the Blog about the benefits of using Twitter as an academic (you can read all of our past posts on Twitter here). For example, recent research indicates  that highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than less-tweeted articles (Eysenbach, 2011[1]).

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Academics are increasingly promoting their research papers via twitter which is then picked up by other researchers and practitioners. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Twitter allows you to set up search terms to enable you to monitor what is being talked about in your areas of interest: You can then comment on the relevant conversations. The more you engage, the more people will follow you to listen to your comments and recommendations. As followers come to you, rather than you approaching them, Twitter is an ideal way to reach new audiences.

BestCollegesOnline.com has recently published an excellent guide on getting started with Twitter as an academic, and improving your use of Twitter to get better results. You can access their excellent guide here: 100 serious Twitter tips for academics. It’s well worth reading!!!!

The LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog recently published an article by Melissa Terras, Co-Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Reader in Electronic Communication in UCL’s Department of Information Studies, who recently took all of her academic research to the web and found this resulted in a huge leap of interest in her work (you can read the full story and see the results here: The Verdict: Is Blogging or Tweeting Really Worth It?). Her conclusion was:  If you want people to find and read your research, build up a digital presence in your discipline, and use it to promote your work when you have something interesting to share. If (social media interaction is often) then (Open access + social media = increased downloads).

Are any of you already using Twitter to promote your research? If so let us know by commenting on this post!