George Veletsianos presented on academics' online participation and experiences with social media and emerging technologies. He discussed two competing narratives about the internet - as either a monstrous or wondrous place - and focused on the middle ground. Through his research, he found that online networks can be places of both conflict and care/vulnerability for academics. Networks of conflict involve issues around professional identity and participation, while networks of care/vulnerability allow academics to express care for one another online in various forms. Veletsianos' research uncovered themes around personal-professional boundaries, intentional versus imposed online identities, and pressures surrounding social media use.

1. SLOAN-C Emerging Technologies Conference, Dallas, TX, April 2014
Networks of Care and Conflict:
Academics’ Online Participation
George Veletsianos, PhD
Canada Research Chair
Associate Professor
School of Education and Technology
@veletsianos
#et4online

2. Two competing narratives of the
web

3. The web as a monstrous place

4. The web as a wondrous place

5. A continuum
I want to talk about what happens at the
middle

6. Questions guiding my research
• How do academics use emerging technologies
(in particular, social media/networks)?
• How is digital and open scholarship enacted?
• What do current scholarly practices look like?
• What is the experience like?

7. Digital Scholarship, Open
Scholarship, Social Scholarship
– Digital Scholarship
– Martin Weller
– Social Scholarship
– Gideon Burton
– Christine Greenhow
– Networked Participatory Scholarship:
the “emergent practice of scholars’ use of participatory
technologies and online social networks to share,
reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and further
their scholarship” (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012, p. 768).

8. “Educational Technology,” as a field is plagued with
editorials and perspectives
Need to move from “state-of-the-art” to “state-of-the-
actual” (Selwyn, 2011)
Faith-based field?
Why you should care #1

9. The future of Higher Education is currently being
designed.
Solutions are frequently not based on evidence.
Empirical research will help us improve designs.
Why you should care #2

10. a worldwide
economic downturn
globalization and
competition
changing
demographics
curtailment of public
funding
pressures for
accountability
impact of emerging
technologies
(Morrison, 2003; Schwier, 2012; Siemens & Matheos, 2010; Spanier, 2010).
purpose of education
- Employment?
Rebirth of edtech
Especially important at a time of
pressures
Socio-political,
cultural, and
economic pressures

11. Social media use is a professional
issue 1/2
How do instructors use social media to foster
engagement?
How can we use online social networks to
expand the diversity of a classroom?
In what ways can researchers use social media
to disseminate their scholarship?

14. Social media use goes beyond
professional issues 2/2

15. Social media use goes beyond
professional issues 2/2
What do we do when we are online and why?
e.g., Visitors vs. Residents (White & LeCornu, 2011)
How does our professional identity impact our
participation and how does our participation
impact our professional identity?

16. In-between the extremes, are stories
of people.
Stories of academia.
Stories that explain who we are as
scholars, educators, and people.

17. What follows is a summary of two
themes from 3+ years of qualitative
and ethnographic studies

18. Theme #1
Networks of Conflict

19. Theme #2
Networks of Care and Vulnerability

20. Networks of care & vulnerability
Social media and online social
networks function as places where
(some) academics express and
experience care.

21. • Caring for one another online takes many
forms
Networks of care & vulnerability

22. Identity

23. Digital Identity
We create it
 Intentional web presence
Lowenthal & Dunlap (2012)
It is created and/or structured for us
Acceptable Identity Fragments (Kimmons
& Veletsianos, 2014)

24. • Personal-professional continuum.
• “Sanitized” participation.
• Pressures to participate
• Other issues?
Discussion

25. Thank
you
www.veletsianos.com
@veletsianos on Twitter
veletsianos at gmail.com
This presentation: www.slideshare.com/veletsianos