Recently, there was a pretty massive discussion about the practice of live-tweeting at conference talk hosted on this blog. While the discussion is by no means over, or particularly conclusive, one idea to emerge was having an icon of some sort on slides during talks to indicate whether or not they could be live-tweeted. Sarah Werning has been kind enough to create and share some logos following this, and I strongly encourage academics to use these when presenting to avoid any future confusion or conflict over this. It only takes an extra couple of minutes to ‘twitter-proof’ a presentation. Of course, you can simply ask at the beginning for your audience not to tweet, rather than plastering these on every slide, if that’s how you choose to roll.
Let’s have a discussion about live-tweeting academic conferences
Tl,dr version: I think we need more appropriate guidelines for live-tweeting conferences, specifically regarding the broadcasting of sensitive research. This should be at the discretion of the author, and ideally stated at the beginning of each talk.
Suzie Maidment, a colleague and friend of mine, recently started a major discussion on and off the internet with the following tweet: “I do think we need to have a discussion about live tweeting unpublished results & conclusions though. It’s just not cool.” (@Tweetisaurus)
The ensuing debate has lasted for four days now, and is on-going. Clearly, we need to have a discussion about live-tweeting at conferences. What followed from the initial tweet was a great debate, punctuated by a series of misunderstandings, ridiculous statements, partially offensive tweets, and what I think from some shows an attitude of disrespect towards colleagues. This was not from everyone involved – the dialogue was overwhelmingly progressive, but cut by a lot of opinions that could clearly do with thinking through a bit more, especially from those a bit new to the twitter game.
Social Media for Science Outreach – A Case Study: That social media thang
This was initially posted at: http://www.nature.com/spoton/2013/04/social-media-for-science-outreach-a-case-study-that-social-media-thang/ as part of a series of case studies exploring how academics use social media.
Jon began university life as a geologist, following this with a treacherous leap into the life sciences with a course in biodiversity and taxonomy. Now undertaking a PhD in tetrapod biodiversity and extinction at Imperial College London, there was a brief interlude were Jon was sucked into the world of science policy and communication. He blogs at https://blogs.egu.eu/network/palaeoblog/, tweets as Protohedgehog and co-runs an [infamous, probably] podcast series called Palaeocast. Jon can usually be found procrastinating in pubs, trying to exchange bad science, usually about dinosaurs, in exchange for food and beer.
Tell us a bit about you and your social media project
I’m currently a PhD student at Imperial College London, investigating the biodiversity patterns of tetrapods (anything with four limbs/wings/flippers) about 145 million years ago to see what we can figure out in a macroevolutionary sense, and whether we can find a ‘hidden’ mass extinction in the fossil record. I commit some of my time to 3 major social media platforms: blogging, tweeting, and podcasting, with a bit of Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and others on the side. These activities are less of a project, per se, and more just stuff I do in parallel, and often with overlap, with my PhD research.