The microblogging service called Twitter is all the rage in many realms, but is still relatively unused in the higher education community. With a bit of a learning curve for most new users it may take a little effort on your part to make it worth your while, but here are the top ten reasons you should jump on board and start tweeting today:

Follow your mentors:  If scholars in your particular field of study are on Twitter, stay in touch with them and their research and activities.
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.
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.
Spread the word: Send updates to colleagues and students about upcoming events, new blog posts, changes to assignments, information about a conference, etc.
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.
Mentor students: Encourage …

In a career where one is constantly seeking positive peer reviews and allowing publishing houses to determine their value, blogging may seem a pointless venture to many in the scholarly community, but here are a couple reasons why you should think otherwise:
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 …

Have you had a chance to try Google Scholar yet?  Trying to fulfill its mission statement of “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, Google has created a specialized search tool specifically for the academic community.  Google Scholar attempts to be an easy way to search for scholarly literature across a wide spectrum of sources helping you find the most relevant research available. It’s website lists its top features as:

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/

As a member of the higher education community you probably think words like marketing or branding have little to do with your career, but as an article in Fast Company magazine explains, “Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the [industry] we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding… To be [successful] today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called YOU.”

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 …