There is an interesting new paper published by Christine Greenhow and Benjamin Gleason, assistant professor in MSU’s College of Education in British Journal of Educational Technology on the sometimes strange relation the scientific world has with social media.

In a survey of 1,600 researchers, Greenhow and Gleason found that only 15 percent use Twitter, 28 percent use YouTube and 39 percent use Facebook for professional purposes. Those who do mainly use social media to find collaborators and disseminate their work and the work of others; they do not use it largely in their teaching of students.

While social media is widely used in fields such as journalism and business – not just to push a product but also to engage in open dialogue with readers and clients – it has failed to take hold in academia’s so-called ivory tower. This is troubling given that universities in the United States and Europe are trying to increase access to publicly funded research, said Christine Greenhow, assistant professor in MSU’s College of Education.

“Only a minority of university researchers are using free and widely available social media to get their results and published insights out and into the hands of the public, even though the mission of public universities is to create knowledge that makes a difference in people’s lives,” Greenhow states. (source)

Abstract of the paper:

This conceptual exploration inquires, what is scholarship reconsidered in the age of social media? How ought we to conceptualize social scholarship—a new set of practices being discussed in various disciplines? The paper offers a critical examination of the practical and policy implications of reconsidering scholarship in light of social media’s affordances toward a conceptualization of social scholarship. For each dimension of Boyer’s original framework, we explain its epistemologies and practices. Next, we take a critical approach to inquiring how each dimension, reconsidered through the lens of social scholarship values and social media affordances, might be envisioned today. This exploration provides concrete examples of how scholars might enact social scholarship with what benefits and challenges.