1. Follow your mentors:  If scholars in your particular field of study are on Twitter, stay in touch with them and their research and activities.
2. Track your interests:  Use Twitter’s “track” function to have any tweet that has a keyword, event, or idea you are interested in sent to you in real time.
3. Collaborate and brainstorm:  The ability to share ideas as they occur any time or place creates an excellent opportunity for sharing ideas on paper or class topics.
4. Spread the word: Send updates to colleagues and students about upcoming events, new blog posts, changes to assignments, information about a conference, etc.
5. Take notes at a conference: Have a colleague that couldn’t get to the conference or to the session you attended?  Take notes using tweets and they can follow along in real time or review them later.
6. Mentor students: Encourage your students to follow your Twitter feed where you can offer encouragement, advice, and counsel.
7. Get to know your colleagues better: Many times the relationships you build with colleagues in your field comes from the one or two conferences you attend together each year.  Following each other’s Twitter feeds gives you a deeper glimpse at the real person.
8. Collaborate on projects. Use a web application such as Tweetworks to facilitate communication between everyone working together.
9. Find potential candidates for openings or openings for yourself: Job search tool allows, such as TweetMyJobs allow job seekers and employers to find each other via the Twitter network.
10. Establish a positive web reputation: With social networks such as Twitter become a bigger part of the higher education world every semester, the sooner you dive in, the better your reputation within these communities will be when they become mainstream in academia.

Interaction with Students: social media, including blogs, are all the rage with your students, but does that mean it should be off limits to you?  Absolutely not!  A blog allows you to enhance your course’s content while also encouraging continued discussion of the materials outside of the classroom through the comment section of your blog.  While some professors have found it helpful to include blog participation as part of the course requirements, others have found that participation comes naturally if the blog topics are simply anatural extension of the classroom environment.  To see an example of this active participation, visit the website of Brigham Young University professor Heather Belnap Jensen.  Dr. Jensen encourages discussion of each blog post by posing a “conversation topic” at the end of each entry.  This allows her to gauge the student’s understanding and opinion on the given subject, which she can address both on the log or in future class lectures.

Interaction with Colleagues: much like your interactions with students, a blog also gives you an opportunity to have valuable interaction with colleagues in your field.  Beyond conferences and symposiums, the opportunity for helpful academic discussion in your given specialty is often quite limited in nature.  The occasional email and telephone call helps keep you in touch with contacts you make, but doesn’t allow you to collaborate or bounce ideas off each other regularly.  Creating a blog that focuses on your ideas will attract other scholars with similar interests.  Clearly the blog isn’t a place to share your break-through research, leave that to the publishers, but a blog is a tremendous place to help clarify and formulate ideas, network with potential colleagues or partners, and get honest quality feedback on your reasoning.

• Search diverse sources from one convenient place
• Find papers, abstracts and citations
• Locate the complete paper through your library or on the web
• Learn about key papers in any area of research

As you search, the articles are ranked and sorted “weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature.” This will help you find the most relevant results for your work quickly and easily.  Give it a try today.  http://scholar.google.com/

How do you apply this in higher education? How does it apply to tenured professors, part-time instructors, and job-seekers alike? You must first look at developing your presence outside of the confines of your classroom and your department. If all of your best work is on your computer, in a filing cabinet, or limited to select publications, you’re severely limiting your professional reputation.

When a student, faculty member, or search committee searches online to find out more about you and finds very little, this sends the message that you’re not engaged in actively promoting your work, your contributions, your service, your brand.

It’s important you tell more people your story, and share your strengths and successes with them. That’s why many are turning to web-based tools like personal websites and social media that help professors, graduate students and others take their work online and out to a wider audience. Think about the brands you know and use. They all have websites or at least a presence online and so should you.  That’s how Scholarly Sites can help you right now.  Find out how…