Embracing digital academia (UPDATED)

Daniel Lende has a wonderful post, both recapping and expanding on a AAA session devoted to digital anthropology. The post discusses a number of exciting and innovating digital projects designed to find new ways of “doing anthropology” and facilitating broad collaboration and interactions.

What I am interested here is the use of digital communication on a more personal level to be a better academic. The phrase “college professor” has historically conjured up images of old men sitting in wood-paneled offices wearing twead jackets and sorting through stacks of books. That image is horribly antiquated and frankly, if you tried to get away with that today, you would have a hard time doing your job well. Starting this blog in October was part of my goal to transition into and embrace the use of social media and digital tools for not just personal means, but also professional ones. I am not a luddite, but I also tend to not be an early adopter of technology, so this is part an explanation of how I use various tools and part a bleg (request for help) for better ways to use them.

Here are the tools I use and how I use them to be a better academic:

The Blog:
Professional academic blogging is becoming increasingly common practice. As I explained back in several of my original posts, my goal for this blog were several-fold:

1. Create a public platform for my research, teaching and perspective on issues with relevance in biological anthropology
2. Use it as a tool for writing, and in particular, writing focused on understanding and incorporating current literature into my thinking on human evolutionary issues
3. A pedagogical resource to broaden the “classroom” my students occupy. Come next year (when I am no longer on sabbatical), you will occasionally be seeing student posts here as an integrated part of my courses.

RSS Feeds:
I use GoogleReader, but there are lots of options for gathering RSS feeds. I would consider this my most important digital tool at this point. Even just within my area of specialization, paleoanthropology, relevant research gets published in scores of journals ranging across a broad range of topics. If I were to rely on getting a hard-copy of all the journals in the mail I would be very quickly overwhelmed. Instead, I sign up for an RSS feed from the journals and news sources that are most important to me, and when new articles get published, I can quickly and efficiently sort through them and file them away based on their relevance. I don’t know how I would keep up with the literature without this at this point. And as a specific request, if anyone can post in the comments a working RSS feed for the Journal of Human Evolution, I would greatly appreciate it.

Facebook:
I had, until quite recently, resisted the idea of using Facebook as anything other than a personal tool, and that is still largely the role it serves for me. But there are three ways in which it has also become a professional tool. First, there a number of great “groups” on Facebook where colleagues post interesting news stories, conference announcements, or other items of interest (e.g. ‘BioAnthropology News’). Facebook’s format is not necessarily ideal for this sort of thing, but it does function as another filter and guide for information of interest to me as a biological anthropologist. I’ve also begun using Facebook as a way of facilitating communication with current and former students within our department by creating a departmental Facebook page. The idea is that this can be a place to inform current students of events happening on campus that might be of interest to them, and over time, establishing a place where alumnae and current students can communicate. Students at my institution get scores of e-mails any given day (as do I), with the result that many of them get quickly ignored. Attempting to engage with them on Facebook is simply another avenue for communication. Finally, in a more subtle way, Facebook makes it easier to have meaningful conversations at professional meetings. This might sound strange, but the ability to get regular updates on the daily lives of colleagues and friends at other institutions means the limited time available at conferences can be spent on specific issues, rather than general “catching up” topics.

Twitter:
I am an even more recent convert to Twitter. I originally signed on to twitter as way of getting quick updates on baseball-related news (one of my hobbies outside of anthropology), but I have begun to expand it as yet another tool that allows me to communicate with colleagues, get access to current issues, and promulgate what I am doing. Twitter isn’t great for having a conversation, but it can do a good job of telling you that a conversation is going on that you might want to be a part of.

So…that is what I am currently doing. Much of my use of these tools has to do with efficiently getting access to, filtering, and maintaining contact with the extraordinary amount of information that is produced each day. What do you do? What can I do better?

UPDATE: In the comments, “bioanthro” reminds me that I also use two programs for synching and organizing files across computer platforms (office, home, laptop). Because they are free and pretty simple, I have come to like Evernote and Dropbox for these two tasks. Zach Throckmorton also recommends Google Plus for networking, something I have yet to get on the bandwagon with.

Finally, via Katy Meyers (twitter), I see this Inside Higher Ed post on the use of technology