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The FOSSIL Project, a web-based initiative, is using social media as a research tool to investigate the engagement levels of professional and amateur paleontologists online. The FOSSIL Project includes face-to-face and online interactions which bring amateur and professional paleontologists together in a community of practice. The community of practice entails an online space through which amateurs and professionals commune in an inclusive form of computer-supported scientific inquiry that we call “social paleontology.” A key component to establishing our community of practice is social media. By examining the ways in which our community engages with the social media platforms of Twitter and Facebook, we can offer unique insights into best practices for using social media to support science-based communities of practice. This longitudinal study examined the ways in which our social media audience(s) engaged with content on various platforms. An encompassing question for this study was: “Which social media components are most engaging, for whom, and under what conditions?” We focused on describing which types of posts generated the most conversations about scientific topics. Using descriptive statistics to quantify post engagement, we saw changes in levels of engagement based on social media post type. Content analysis of the community’s comments reveal that basic conversations about science (those without much scientific merit) occur on social media. Our results indicate that engagement level is dependent upon: (1) social media post type, such as research-focused stories, informative stories, stories featuring opportunities for community members, and paleontological news stories; (2) the different forms of audience segmentation occurring within social media platforms, such as the plethora of professional paleontologists on Twitter, yet low professional numbers on Facebook; and (3) best practices for creating a community through social media. This study suggests that social media is a useful but underutilized tool in building scientific communities of practice.
Throughout the U.S., fossil clubs host meetings, attend field trips, conduct outreach, and use the Internet to learn about paleontology. In their Internet use, these fossil clubs communicate on social media to facilitate discussion within their groups and among other groups, discussing the fossils found on field trips as well as provide their thoughts on social media posts about paleontology. The FOSSIL Project has actively been uniting fossil clubs throughout the United States to create a Community of Practice (CoP). This networked CoP will “collaborate in blended learning, the practice of science, and outreach” (Crippen et al. 2014). Building on previous research presented at NARST 2014 (Crippen et al. 2014), this study defines a specific component of the FOSSIL Project’s Community of Practice: social media. While the fossil clubs engage in communication on their unique social media pages, the FOSSIL Project seeks to understand cross-group communication occuring on social media through the FOSSIL Project’s social media pages, more specifically, the FOSSIL Project’s Facebook page. This study uses the discourse of the FOSSIL Project’s Facebook followers as well as decriptive statistics to understand the ways in which amateur and professional paleontologists engage on social media.
Paleontology captivates people in the physical spaces of museum exhibits and fossil hunting field trips yet also extends to audiences in online spaces such as Twitter and Facebook via a social media practice known as social paleontology. The FOSSIL Project, a National Science Foundation-funded initiative in the United States (NSF-DRL #1322725), uses social paleontology to bring together paleontologists from across the spectrum of expertise, from novice to expert, as a more formal community. The project includes a public-private partnership between researchers at the University of Florida and a private software development firm, Atmosphere Apps. This case, which illustrates how these two entities worked together to identify, develop, and implement an innovative social media campaign is presented as the result of a three-year (November 2013-December 2016) study which included three iterative cycles of design-based research. The study's scope includes the development of an evidence-based, educative social media messaging campaign and through follower engagement delimits the people and institutions that constitute the community as it exists social ecosystem niches. Aside from a basic understanding that followers engage with photo posts and posts with intriguing headlines, limited research exists involving the use of formal learning as a framework for examining the effectiveness of messaging. Using marketing materials produced by Atmosphere Apps that were based on an assessment of the interests and needs of community members, including color schemes and branded fonts, researchers created separate social messaging campaigns for Twitter and Facebook. Best practices from various fields were merged to create quality messages including: graphic design principles, use of marketing-centric messaging strategies, and use of educative strategies for sustaining engagement in science learning. The results of this study, including the public-private partnership between Atmosphere Apps and the FOSSIL Project serves as an example for others who seek to create educative social media engagement.
Citizen Science: Theory and Practice
Social Media as a Platform for a Citizen Science Community of Practice2018 •
The majority of science learning occurs in informal environments such as museums or aquaria, but also in online spaces such as forums or social media (Falk & Storksdieck, 2010). In a design-based effort, we report here on the examination of the behavioral engagement of a community of followers with social media messages that were systematically produced by researchers on the FOSSIL Project, an NSF-funded project focused on building knowledge and relationships that center on paleontology (I.e. the study of fossils). Focusing Twitter and Facebook, we investigated the following research question: what messaging elements lead to increased behavioral engagement? In this presentation, we concentrate specifically on quantifying behavioral engagement with social media messaging and refining Falk and Dierking's (2013) Contextual Model of Learning (CMoL) as it applies to the social media landscape. We find that community engagement varies dependent on platform, messaging elements such as hashtags, URLs, mentions, and post type. In particular, the use of hashtags without the inclusion of other messaging elements on Twitter showed significantly lower engagement than when used on Facebook. While these findings are significant in and of themselves, we argue that our study provides empirical evidence for use of CMoL with social media.
This session provides examples, tools and strategies for academics to use social media as a way to communicate and share scholarship. The speakers will address best practices for Academia.edu, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Instagram and blogging. They will conclude with advice on how to improve or get started in social media.
2015 •
Social media has deeply transformed the way people communicate ideas and information, shifting from traditional media forms (e.g. newspapers, television and magazines) to digital media; of which, Facebook and Twitter stand out in terms of disseminating academic information and conservation outreach. Broad scientific communication and outreach have been highlighted as one of the most efficient methods to tailor people's behaviour towards environmentally-friendly practices. However, some concerns about the use of social media have been raised, particularly: the potential misinterpretation of inherently brief messages; the fast analysis of complex problems, situations or concepts; the fact that they can trigger misinformation cascades due to the time-sensitive and political nature of some conservation issues; an overestimation of potential outreach due to the homophilic effect; or the likelihood to suffer from information fatigue syndrome (IFS). We evaluated the presence of the scientific journal Barbastella-published by the Spanish Society for Bat Research and Conservation (SECEMU)-on Facebook and Twitter during a period of almost two years and its Twitter outreach performance during the Spanish Bat Research and Conservation Conference (SBRCC) in 2014. Since the launch of its Facebook and Twitter accounts, Barbastella has respectively gathered 1,935 and 931 followers. Several posts have potentially reached between 5,000-17,000 (Facebook) and 3,000-5,500 (Twitter) users and whereas the Facebook account presented an audience mostly composed by local researchers and bat enthusiasts from Spain and Portugal, the Twitter account had a much more international audience. During the SBRCC, there were more online (Twitter and Facebook) followers of the conference than in situ conference attendants, even though conference tweets were almost exclusively posted by the Journal committee. Our analyses reveal the large potential of Facebook and Twitter to disseminate information far beyond more classical tools and highlights that social media can potentially play an important role in conservation science, while serious consideration on its usage must be taken into account to reduce possible social media inherent weaknesses. Both social media platforms were found to be complementary suggesting that cross-posting on multiple networks can considerably improve visibility. In order to disseminate research without compromising time commitment towards other scientific tasks, it is essential to have a targeted strategy for using social media with an accurate and reasonable planning of online time commitment, addressing all public target time-zones, selecting the most appropriate platform, publishing understandable brief and visual posts with reliable information amongst other optimizing strategies.
Visitor Studies
Science Engagement via Twitter: Examining the Educational Outreach of Museums, Zoos, Aquariums and Other Science Organizations2018 •
Ideas in Ecology and Evolution
The social biology professor: Effective strategies for social media engagement2013 •
Evolutionary biology and ecology have always been collaborative enterprises, benefitting enormously from active communication of ideas among traditional academic networks of peers. The Internet age, with its thriving online social networks, offers new tools that can help our current generation of biologists to collaborate, and communicate with the public, more effectively. Having a dynamic web presence, being part of an active blogging, Facebook, or Google+ community, and being a strategic tweeter can help your research, teaching, and service programs. Below we outline how to be a strategically savvy and active social media scientist, and discuss some of the pitfalls to avoid wasting time. We highlight some ecologists and evolutionary biologists who are active in social media to help you understand the many ways social media can help you in your academic life.
International Journal of Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments
Mental models and social media personas: a case of amateur palaeontologists2018 •
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