After 5 years of busting a gut to produce AcWriMo annually, I (Charlotte Frost) have had to bow out this year. My personal and professional commitments mean it simply isn’t possible for me to organise the content and corral you all into absurd levels of productivity. So I’ve taken the difficult decision of not being the AcWriMo producer for 2017.

But AcWriMo was designed from the start to be a community endeavour. I’s YOU who really make it happen!

By committing publicly to your goals and keeping yourself and others accountable – in real and virtual communities – YOU are the ones who have made November so darn productive year after year!

Last year we substantially updated the PhDometer app and made it free so that you no longer need to grapple with a spread sheet of 1000s of entries in order to log your progress. Instead you simply open the app and type away – sharing your results as and when you like. And if you opt into it, these results go onto the leader board, giving you the same public accountability you’ve always had – in less of the time.

The idea behind the app update was to put even more of the power in YOUR hands.

There will be no less activity this November – many teams, individuals and organisations have already been in touch telling me what they’re planning. And you can still download our toolkits for hosting your own team. Just like every other year, you just need to hop onto social media now and again and check out the #AcWriMo hashtag for all the advisory goodness and community support. You just won’t find it on the PhD2Published blog this time.

Wishing you every success!

Charlotte

AcWriMo stands for Academic Writing Month –  an academic write-a-thon hosted by PhD2Published every November.

The idea is that you set yourself an academic writing goal to achieve by the end of the month. Some people prefer to count words typed, others the time and effort they put in, or the number of projects completed. You sign up and then follow the hashtag on Twitter or check our Facebook page for tips, tricks advice and support from a community of thousands of academics. Together we investigate what it takes to become an efficient academic writer – and of course make academic writing a bit less lonely.

For the first time this year we are offering facilitator toolkits (click the pink button to the right) to help you host an AcWriMo team at your own university or even just focus on academic writing in one of your classes. La Trobe University are a great example of how to lead AcWriMo in your own institution.

If you need help getting started just ask on Twitter or Facebook and someone will be there to help you!

More about US:

The newly redesigned PhD2Published boasts hundreds of blog posts on various aspects of academic publishing from writing book proposals to dealing with reviewers comments on a journal article; presenting papers at conferences; publishing with open access journals; and professional networking – as well as countless tips on writing productivity. We receive well over 10,000 unique visitors a month and have a Twitter following of more than 13,000 people. Founder, Charlotte Frost, has presented PhD2Published at institutions including the Australian National University, Duke University and University College London and we have been featured in publications including Chronicle of Higher Education, the Guardian and Inside Higher Ed.

Host Pat Thomson will moderate a discussion on the challenges of setting and meeting academic writing goals. Everyone is welcome to join in with their questions and insights about productivity in academic writing. At this time of year, many writers are trying new approaches and making new resolutions; in this chat, we will consider why those resolutions are so hard to keep. Are we setting unrealistic goals? Are we saying “yes” to too many non-writing activities? Are we trying to find time to write without giving up anything else? Are we sticking with writing approaches that haven’t worked well for us in the past? Are we getting discouraged by the lack of immediate results? Are we assessing our own writing too harshly? One thing that we know often hampers attempts to develop new habits is trying to do it alone. While writing is often a solitary task, we can still gain solace from a community of other writers. The #acwri chats are a way of building that community and creating a space for writers to share their experiences with all facets of academic writing. Please join us on January 22 to be part of this valuable forum. In addition to questions and comments about goal setting, we welcome suggestions for topics for future chats.

To learn more about the history of the #acwri hashtag, read this post from Anna Tarrant. And to learn more about the #AcWriMo hashtag, read this post from Charlotte Frost.

‘Floating away — Peace Pig 260’ by https://www.flickr.com/photos/sidonath/

Keep things in perspective. So what if you didn’t achieve your goal today. Who cares if you spent valuable writing time on Facebook or went out on the night you’d promised yourself you’d write. These things happen. In fact, sometimes these things happen because we really need a break! If you ditch your writing for something else don’t beat yourself up about it, just see it for what it is: a bit of time out. Feeling guilty about not writing is a waste of your time and energy and it will only make it harder to write in the future. Guilt will gnaw away at your self-esteem and when you do actually get down to writing, you will be filled with thoughts of failure. Keeping a record (like our 2014 accountability spreadsheet) of your progress on a project can really help with guilt because it will keep things in perspective. It will also help you see patterns forming – if there are any. For example maybe there’s a reason why you regularly struggle to write at a certain time.

Say no to people in a way that shuts down negotiation. Many of us just can’t say no. For early-career academics it can be frightening to turn down an offer to contribute to something. We worry that we’ll get a bad reputation or that we’ll skip over something that might  be CV gold dust. We say yes through a fear of missing out, a really bad grasp of time management or worst of all, guilt. But if you want to finish that T/D/A/P/C you HAVE to say no and in a way that can’t become a yes, when you inevitably get a second begging email 2 days later. Don’t use language that allows for any wiggle room ‘I don’t think I can right now’ or ‘I’m really over-stretched’, phrases like that are just open doors to a good negotiator!  Don’t list the things you have on your plate right now because let’s face it, there’s no standard ‘to do list’ length. Sure you have 100 things to do, well big whoop because the person who asking for your help has 110! Quantifying like this is just a way of not saying no! And certainly don’t counter-offer with a reduced task because that reduced task is going to magically grow over night – and who’s to say that the person asking isn’t already giving you a reduced task in the hope of building on that. Just say NO! Keep it kind, quick and closed! For example ‘Thank you so much for thinking of me but unfortunately I am not able to contribute at this time.’ You know what, copy and paste that exact phrase right now and keep it somewhere handy because you’re going to need it!

Stow your inner critic. Many of us undo our good intentions by letting the critical voice inside take over. We write a sentence, we edit that sentence, we rewrite that sentence and so forth…Try it this way: write as much as you can of what you’d like to say. This will vary from person to person. Personally I like to get an entire draft done before I pick it apart. Other people find this difficult and do better writing a section or a set of paragraphs. Whatever you do, try and complete a substantial portion before you turn to your inner critic to evaluate things. In fact write it and leave it to marinade for a while if possible. Then return to it for a designated ‘editing’ session. Only now should you unleash all that critical power and get that text into better shape. Criticise too soon and you’ll get caught in loop.

Bring it! Being an academic isn’t easy but then, that’s kind of the point. We’re supposed to think really hard, I mean, that’s what we signed on for right? Sometimes this gets the better of us. We all  have moments of feeling over-stimulated, overwhelmed or over-stretched. And sometimes we need to seek refuge and and a bit of R ‘n’ R. The rest of the time however you gotta bring it! And what I mean by that is energy and a positive attitude. One way to do this is to try and start everyday with some positivity. Before your feet even touch the floor when you wake up in the morning, take a mental inventory of three things you’re grateful for. Any three things! You might choose people in your life or, if you’re like me, you might choose food! (I’m grateful for Hong Kong pineapple buns and milk tea nearly every day!) Notice how differently you feel when you start off like this, rather than from a state of stress. And notice how it impacts your writing if you sit down with the right attitude.

Get support. AcWriMo is all about building a support team. It’s all well and good having a great PhD supervisor or a lot of fantastic colleagues but they won’t always be there at 2.00am when you’re freaking out about citation styles. The beauty of AcWriMo is that you’ll virtually meet people from all over the world with a range different of experiences and many of those people will be online at 2.00am! Find people to connect with during AcWriMo and continue to nurture those relationships after the month is over. These are your people, treat them well! You might find them supporting and advising you on all manner of academic life. You might even find them inviting you to present your work at their own institution or letting you know about jobs that might suit you.

‘Floating away — Peace Pig 260’ by https://www.flickr.com/photos/sidonath/

Organise your time. No matter how much of your time you’re able to dedicate to your thesis/dissertation/article/paper/chapter you won’t get it done if you don’t manage your time. In fact, it’s not about the time you have but the way that you use it. There are lots of ways you can do this. One is to use the Pomodoro Technique and divide your writing day into pomodori (25 minutes of writing 5 minutes of resting). Another is to notice which are your most effective writing hours. For example do you do best first thing in the morning or only after your third cup of coffee? Whenever is best for you, mark out that time for writing and fit in other tasks around it. And don’t over-do the amount of time you dedicate to writing – sometimes less is more if it stops you from feeling burnt out the next day.

Break. it. down. Of course your writing project is daunting if you continue to think of it as a T/D/A/P/C. Instead try to break it down into a set of components. I have started using the free Trello project management software to help me create a workflow of task cards and action columns. You can attach all manner of items to a card including Word and Google Docs, images, check-lists and due dates. You might like to have columns for research tasks such as reading, note taking, writing up, editing, and then pass a topic card (and attachments) through various stages.  Or maybe it makes more sense to you to divide up your project into chapter or section columns and sub-section cards. Perhaps you prefer to do this on a Whiteboard or using Post-Its? However you do it, the  important part is just to get yourself to see the project as a set of elements and then to see each element in terms of what you’re required to do for that part alone. Once you’re at that stage it is a thousand times easier to start, to keeping working away on each tiny task and, most importantly, to finish (and finish on time because now you’ve seen your work for what it really is – a set of tasks – you’re more capable of allocating the right amount of time to each task).

Set realistic goals. In November for AcWriMo we advocate pushing yourself harder than usual. For the most part this is because it is a diagnostic programme; we believe that if you put in twice the hours (words, projects etc.) you’ll find out what doesn’t work in half the time. Plus we build a support community to spur you on and who doesn’t want to finish their T/D/A/P/C that bit quicker? But in the main it’s important to set goals that you can meet so that you learn to manage your time efficiently and can keep up the momentum. If you repeatedly fail to meet your goals you’ll feel bad about yourself and your writing, you’ll likely have a very erratic writing schedule and, you won’t be able to see what other tasks can be completed while writing is going on (you might even start to feel like you’re failing at everything and that’s not good). Use AcWriMo to find out what is realistic for you in terms of hours or words you can write and stick to that the rest of the year.

Put ya thing down. It often feels like academic writing means like you have to make a strong and definitive statement on something. This is intensified when working on a PhD thesis because you have all sorts of feelings of guilt and self-loathing and have the desire to prove yourself and have something megatastic to show for all that work. But would we ever even open our mouths if we felt this kind of weight on our shoulders. The trick is to think of academic writing as a conversation. Gerald Graff demonstrated this idea in his classic They Say, I Say (even if I prefer the Missy Elliott version). Each time you sit down to write imagine yourself in dialogue with someone. What do you need to say to carry that conversational baton on to the next runner/writer?

Duh! Read something.. It sounds really obvious but you need to have read enough to even start writing in the first place. If you are struggling to write, it probably means you haven’t read enough yet so get back to the books (other information platforms are available) and read some more. Or re-read the texts you’re working with and attain a deeper level of understanding. Likewise, if you find yourself stuck at any point, pick up a book for inspiration. Either look at the content and refresh your thoughts by reconsidering what is being said, or look at the style and see if you can’t jump start you next paragraph by using the same approach. You might even go and read the newspaper, just read something to fill the gap where the ‘omg what the hell am I trying to say’ thoughts are and you’ll be on your writing way in no time.

By the Next 28 Days: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thenext28days/

1. The template. The Thesis Whisperer, Inger Mewburn, and many other academic research and writing experts (including: Gerald Graff, Barbara Kamler and Pat Thomson, Karen Kelsky) suggest using a template to get yourself started. Here’s one Inger shared with us:

My paper’s main purpose is… (50 words)

Researchers who have looked at this subject are… (50 words)

Debate centres on the issue of … (25 words)

My contribution will be… (50 words)

If you’ve done a decent amount of research you should be able to meet this 175 word target in minutes. And the next step is just to expand on each point. So why not take one of the existing opinions you’ve read about and add roughly 200 words to section 2. And repeat.

2. The blog post. (ahem!) If getting stuck in on a piece of academic writing feels too daunting, there are two ways in which writing blog post can help you. Really, you just want to trick yourself into doing something other than looking at cat pictures so writing any old post for your blog can help here. Depending on the content of your blog, just put together the next installment (is it a conference report? is it about how to search for cat pictures? is it about how hard it is to start writing?). The key is to just get yourself writing anything and once you’re feeling productive you can hop over to the harder task of your thesis, book, chapter, article, conference paper…But another way this can help you is if you take the idea you are working on and try to make a 500-800 word blog post on it. This might align with the recent arguments for a buzz-feed-i-fication of academia (but it’s certainly not a dumbing down of your work). If you can take the pressure off by allowing yourself to write in a different style, for a slightly different audience, it can help you focus. Once you’ve hashed out the idea in web-speak, then copy that text into a new document and instead of having to start from scratch, you have to turn into an editor and convert and expand upon what you have.

3. The baby step. What’s the smallest possible thing you could do to write the next part of your work? Think about the paragraph you need to craft next or even just the sentence. Set yourself a time limit to do just that one small task (the good old Pomodoro Technique works well here) and promise yourself that’s all you have to do for now (and you’ll get a reward afterwards). Maybe you’ll watch a movie, take a bath, eat an entire jar of Nutella…the reward here is up to you. Now, sit down and complete your teeny-tiny writing task. Take that itty-bitty baby-step forwards and see if you don’t exceed your own self-imposed limit.

4. The note-taker. Oh no no no this isn’t academic writing, it’s just a bit of note taking actually! You may already use the Cornell Method of note taking, if so you’ll know this trick pretty well. Instead of sitting down to write, sit down to take some notes. If it helps, don’t even do it in a Word Doc, choose an application that allows you to jot down sections of notes instead (Scrivener, Trello, Gingko all work here). The idea is just that you disregard any thoughts of creating an argument and you simply gather notes on the ideas and concepts you’re dealing with. Believe it or not, this will form the bulk of the end product anyway and the ‘writing’ stage will become more of a ‘drafting/editing’ stage. In fact, if it helps, imagine there is no such thing as academic writing, just taking notes and organising them.

5. The insurance policy. Instead of waiting until you sit down with a cup of coffee on Monday morning to start or continue working on your latest writing project, have a writer’s block insurance policy. Towards the end of every writing session, make yourself a paragraph of detailed notes on what you need to do next. List the points you need to make and which texts you’ll use to help you make them. Be as detailed as you can. Next time you sit down to write, pull out your plan and set to work. Not only will this jog your memory come Monday morning, but you might even be able to use it as a template for writing by separating out each task and replacing it with the actual section of writing that performs that task.

Dr. Anna Tarrant is a social scientist with a background in human geography, currently working as a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. She is former editor of PhD2Published.com, and reflects on the history of #AcWri in this guest post.

#Acwri — which stands for academic writing — is a hashtag used in online discussions about all things related to academic writing (as it is broadly defined). It has been instrumental in establishing an on-going, online participatory community, providing an open platform for sharing knowledge about academic writing (empowering each member as experts in their right) and generating useful resources in the form of summaries. Scholars of all career stages and disciplines participate in a peer-to-peer support network by sharing tips, asking questions, discussing challenges and reflecting on how they write. But where did #AcWri come from?

Origins of the hashtag

I was the editor of PhD2Published during its first ever Academic Writing Month (originally Academic Book Writing Month or #AcBoWriMo, which was eventually shortened to Academic Writing Month or #AcWriMo). Interest in academic writing didn’t end when the month came to a close and this new community continued to regularly share their academic writing wins and woes using the shortened #AcWri hashtag that had been suggested by Melissa Lovell (@melovell). Around about the same time, Dr Jeremy Segrott (Cardiff University) ran a live chat using the hashtag #writter to find out if there was any interest in establishing a twitter-based writing support group. Following this chat (and having gained permission from the existing #AcWri community), we all decided to work together to organise and run fortnightly Live Chats using the #AcWri hashtag. These took place every fortnight on a Thursday evening at 8pm GMT and each one focused on a particular aspect of the writing process.

Some of the chats we have run

The live chats have covered a wide range of topics, including but not limited to; writing journal articles, turning conference papers into journal articles, writing grant applications, finding time to write and academic writing for part-time students and researchers. The topics were identified through monitoring of ongoing discussion using the #AcWri hashtag. This was important for ensuring that each topic was of interest to the community.

Every Live Chat was summarised using Storify, an online tool for creating stories from social media content. Posted on PhD2Published and Jeremy’s blog, these are really useful resources for academic writers and provide a record of the community’s discussions.

Going global

As a result of the live chats and the increasing popularity of the hashtag, the #AcWri community continued to grow and extend its reach. Demand for a chat time more suited to Australia/Asia/South Pacific time zones also grew so we announced #acwri APAC, a live chat run at 10+ GMT. This was co-chaired by Jennifer Lim and Wini Cooke who regularly participated in the community. #AcWri APAC extended the reach of #AcWri by supporting a multi-disciplinary, international discussion forum focused around academic writing.

#AcWri today

While the live chats are no longer run, the hashtag continues to be used on a regular basis by a well-established, global and thriving academic community. #AcWri is a fantastic peer support network for academic writers of all career stages and continues to facilitate an open platform for sharing knowledge about academic writing, empowering each member as experts in their own right.

By the Next 28 Days: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thenext28days/

1. The relevant quote. Pick up a text that relates to what you’re writing. If you’ve already read this text and have perhaps highlighted useful sections, pick a quotation and write it into your blank document. If you haven’t read the text, do a scan of a few pages looking for the most relevant part and again copy a quotation into your document. Now below the quote, explain what the author is saying, but in your own words. Now take a position, do you agree or disagree, or do you think there are both strengths and weaknesses to this point? Whatever your stance explain it under the text you’ve just written. Now you can either delete the quote (and reference the idea), or move it down so that it directly illustrates your interpretation of the point you just made.
2. The therapist. A while back I wrote about using 750Words as my writing therapist but you can actually use this approach with many a writing platform. The trick is to ask yourself a set of questions and answer them. Try starting something like this:

Me 1: Hi Charlotte, what do you think you should be writing today?

Me 2: Duh! My book!

Me 1: OK so which bit exactly?

Me 2: The last chapter, the one where I try to frame the different approaches to writing about art online.

Me 1: What is the ultimate point you are trying to make with this chapter?

Me 2: That there are ways of responding to art online that change what we think of as ‘art criticism’.

Me 1: Er, doesn’t that sound like a good starting sentence?

Now delete everything but that good starting sentence and carry on from there. If you get stuck, just ask yourself what’s going on again.

3. The route map. A little like ‘the therapist’, this technique is all about writing down your route before you set off. Think about what you need to do next in your writing project. What section do you need to write? What points do you need to make in that section? What point should come first? Write a few sentences to explain this all to yourself. For example: ‘next I need to explain how some art critics see no difference between writing for a newspaper or a blog. I should offer some examples – maybe three or four….’ Now you know where you need to go, you can assess how much time it will take to get there and set off on the first leg of the tour.

4. The thief. This is not where I condone plagiarism! But we can learn a whole lot from each other on how to do things. Choose a book or article that you like. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with what you are writing, it just has to be something that resonates with you. Look at the first few pages and analyse what the writer has done. For example, if you’re trying to write the start of something, ask yourself ‘how did they begin?’ Did they use a quotation or statistic? If you’re deeper inside a piece of written work, look at how they presented an idea. How many paragraphs did they use, how did they transition between paragraphs. Go back to what you’re working on and see if you can apply some of the same structure of logic.

5. The what’s worse than this. This trick is all about offsetting. Ever noticed how easy it is to fill out a dreaded grant application when your journal article is the worse task of the two? Well now you need to work that in reverse. What’s worse than writing whatever it is you need to write? How about grading students work? Cleaning the bathroom? Find something worse – you might even make a list of things you need to do an prominently include the worse tasks. Now  notice how much more energy you have knowing your not doing any of that!

Do some warm ups! Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) begins 1 November, and there is no time like the present to start considering your goals. As our own Charlotte Frost wrote recently, you can set goals for word counts, time committed, or pages completed–whatever works best for you. Trying out different kinds of goals can help you decide what method will be most useful for AcWriMo and help you prepare to set goals for our big thirty-day commitment.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiddleoak/
under this licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost continue their Hackademic series with a new set of hints, tips and hacks focused on academic networking.

 SUBSPECIALIZE. Build and promote an expertise that’s cross-disciplinary or even tangential from your main subject area. A more generalised, let’s call it ‘sub-specialty’ is going to attract a wider group of people to your work. Engaging with folks in neighboring and related disciplines will help you build a more diverse network. The points of intersections between our own work and the work of our peers is often what most inspires us to push off in new directions. We’re fans of networks built around related but divergent interests. Fiona Barnett, the HASTAC Scholars Director, coined their fantastic mission statement, “Difference is our operating system.” This is something we believe strongly of academia and scholarship. Ultimately, our work is only as good as the connections it makes and the discussions it gives rise to.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiddleoak/
under this licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost continue their Hackademic series with a new set of hints, tips and hacks focused on academic networking.

HAVE A PROFESSIONAL APPROACH. It’s worth having a networking strategy for every academic event you attend, and even more important to strategize at a macro-scale. We advocate always having a 5 year plan, even if it changes iteratively every 6 months. What job would you like to have? What things might you have published? What courses might you have taught? Now, work back from there. Who will be able to help you achieve these goals? Don’t just think about who is going to publish your work — although that’s also important — think about who can advise you and about whose work can serve as a model? These are the people you’ll need to start reaching out to in one way or another. You might start just by following them on Academia.edu, or Twitter. But eventually you should be ready to engage with them in a mutually-supportive and professional way. However, don’t start with a slew of unsolicited emails announcing your five year plan, and also don’t hover around prospective collaborators at conferences with nothing interesting to say. When you first reach out to potential mentors or collaborators, be clear and upfront about why you’re getting in touch and what you’re asking them for so they can make an instant assessment of the time involved in completing your request. And relate your questions to their work so they know you are genuinely engaged with what they do. If you’re writing them anything longer than a Tweet (say, an email or Facebook message) try something like:

 Dear Professor Clever-Cloggs,

 I’m interested in applying your method of teaching X with Z. I have already read your paper ‘Blah Blah’ but would love the opportunity to ask you a few additional questions (see below) so that I can fully synthesise your approach.

Likewise, if you approach somebody at a conference, first patiently wait your turn and second, be clear and direct about how you’d like to connect with them. Often there won’t be time at the conference itself so be ready to suggest a low-labour alternative. For example ask them if they’d be happy to Skype or Google Hangout with you for 20 minutes at a time of their choosing. Or offer to send them a follow up email with a few mutual action points. The key is to make it easy for them to work with you.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiddleoak/
under this licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost continue their Hackademic series with a new set of hints, tips and hacks focused on academic networking.

 SHHHHH! LISTEN! When it comes to collaborating and networking, listening is just good form, and it will give you a much better idea of where your own work sits in the landscape of your subject area and neighboring disciplines. In fact, think of interacting with people as doing a kind of book-less literature survey. Find out everything you can about that person’s opinions and publications. You’ll stop yourself making any embarrassing mistakes or overblowing the originality of your work if you survey the territory first — carefully. And think about how you might listen on multiple channels. The conversation on Twitter is different from the conversation on your colleagues’ blogs, and both are different from what you’ll find at your annual conference or in a peer-reviewed journal. Don’t get so caught up in any one medium that you can’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak. Your discipline is happening, literally and figuratively, all over the place.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiddleoak/
under this licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost continue their Hackademic series with a new set of hints, tips and hacks focused on academic networking.

TIP OFF THE PRESS. Sometimes you’ll organise an event or publish a piece of work that has obvious impact beyond your academic field alone. When this happens make sure you talk to your university’s marketing and press team. Work with them to draft a brief and to-the-point piece of text you can send out — press-release style — to relevant news outlets. It might be that you’re organising an event that will benefit the local community so make sure the local papers know about it well in advance. If you can make life easy for them as well by presenting them with text that pre-empts their questions you’ll increase your chances of the event/project being written about. If your work has real national/international impact then it’s really important you work closely with the press team not just to make sure you get press but also so that they can protect you and your intellectual property (no matter how you choose to license it, whether with a Creative Commons license or a more conventional copyright).

 Academic work is seldom a fame-game, but it’s always worth publicising important work because it will be bring prestige to your university and give you added kudos in your department (not to mention it may well build an audience for your work and help sell books etc) and that can lead to bigger and better grants. Jesse writes more on this subject in his article, “Promoting Open Access Publications and Academic Projects.” There, he writes, “Our work has value, and it’s safe to openly admit that. In fact, at this moment in education, championing what we do should be a major part of what we do.”

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiddleoak/
under this licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost continue their Hackademic series with a new set of hints, tips and hacks focused on academic networking.

ORGANIZE AN EVENT. The most productive sorts of networks are populated by both strong and weak ties. One of the best ways to network is to attend events in your field, and sometimes it’s just as useful to attend events in neighboring fields. Even more useful, though, is to organize an event of your own. Doing so will force you to not only show up for the event, but you’ll also have the opportunity to work closely with folks you might not otherwise have the opportunity to work with. It’s also an important service to the profession. If you’re a graduate student, perhaps start by organizing a dissertation writing group or a series of workshops about academic writing. If you’re a classroom teacher, start a pedagogy club for talking about new perspectives on and strategies for teaching. When you find yourself without community, build one, and work to populate the community with a diverse array of participants — not just students in your cohort or faculty in your department, but a wider group of people that don’t always do exactly what you’d do or say exactly what you’d say.

After you’ve had some practice with organizing a smaller event or community, try something more ambitious. Gather together a group of your peers for an unconference or symposium on a subject related to your work. Or, even better, find a way to gather your peers together for a project that engages your local community (or some more global digital community). Put yourself in the center of the fray, wherever that fray is, and do work to help your discipline — your community — evolve.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiddleoak/
under this licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB

Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost continue their Hackademic series with a new set of hints, tips and hacks focused on academic networking.

 SHARE AND SHARE WELL. Be good at sharing useful content via the social media platforms you choose to use. This may sound obvious but it’s easily forgotten and it ties in with our tip about being a good listener. Don’t take to Facebook or Twitter just to announce the paper you published. You want people interested in you and to friend/follow you if they value you as a useful source of information. So find out what’s going on in your academic world and pass it on. A great tool that can help you with keeping a steady flow of interesting information flowing through your social media accounts is Buffer. Buffer allows you to quickly select meaningful content from around the web and queue it up to be published at selected intervals — even when you’re away from you computer. This means that if you have very limited time to catch up with your accounts, you’ll still come across as an active user. Another useful tool can be IFTTT. IFTTT allows you to automate lots of content gathering/sharing. There are some people who use it to automatically tweet content selected by a Google or Talk Walker alert for a particular subject area. But ultimately this will make your Twitter account seem like a bot and you’ll frustrate followers who want to hear from YOU! Far better to use it as a way of making sure your blog posts automatically get tweeted, or to allow the same piece of content to be shared across all social media platforms at once, or even to retweet content from your favourite blogs. In short, automation can be good but only when it’s set up carefully and deliberately.