I taught my first workshop for the year yesterday. It was a big one: a 4-hour session with researchers from the Okinawan Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) on ways to grow a community around your research using social media. It covered platforms that weren’t social media exactly but that worked well with establishing a strong online presence and complemented active social media use (e.g. LinkedIn, Google Scholar, figshare).
This was a gig that was a long time coming. Irina Filonova (@irina_filonova) had invited us (the Research Whisperers) to OIST in 2020 and we were slated to be there in May. It would’ve been my first time in Okinawa. I hadn’t been overseas in many years. I was excited.
Then COVID.
So, we postponed, not knowing how long the postponement would be.
It was a delight to have Irina contact me late last year asking whether I’d be willing/able to present a workshop via Zoom for OIST researchers. Would I ever!
Yesterday, during the workshop, we talked about many issues around the idea and practice of creating and managing a digital presence. I facilitate workshops on this content all the time and, every time, the feel of the session is different because the experiences and contributions of the participants add so much texture to our conversations.
Working with OIST is also fascinating because it’s an institute that is all about research – it has PhD researchers, no undergrads at all, and an extremely global community of scholars gathered there. You can check out the ‘shape’ of the place at the OIST Facts & Figures page!
I hope that I’ll be able to keep in contact with participants from the session as they’re doing fab work and were a delight to spend time with.
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If you’re interested in knowing more about the kinds of things I might’ve said, here are:
- the posts about researchers and social media on Research Whisperer (many of which are mine),
- at the RED Alert blog (again, many of which are mine. This is the La Trobe University researchers’ blog), and
- the succinct ‘How to’ post on using social media I contributed to the AHA ECR blog a few years ago. It’s a good primer for those who are getting started, or aiming to rejuvenate, their digital presence.
Dr Tseen Khoo 
This is great! So glad that something came of this.
Hopefully, many things will come of this! Given all our travel restrictions at the moment, it was good to be reminded of the global community of researchers out there who are all still busily doing amazing things.