The NAFSA Research & Scholarship Network Ventures into Social Medial Waters

Over the weekend my colleague Bryan McAllister-Grande, the NAFSA Research and Scholarship Network Leader, posted to the network discussion board about his plans to establish a social media presence for the Network (it’s free to join all NAFSA networks by the way).  This post today is mostly a copy and paste job (with Bryan’s permission) with a few comments from me inserted:

Over the coming months, we're going to be taking the (somewhat reluctant) plunge into social media and trying out a few new communications features for the Network. Although the main activity will continue to happen on these discussion boards, those of you using other tools may want to check these out for access to quicker and sometimes better information. I hope this allows for some more widespread participation and interactivity, as well.

This experimenting is also part of a specific effort to reach out to graduate students across the world and create a wider community of graduate students engaged in international education research. More details on this coming soon.

For the moment, follow or join these if you'd like:

RS Network on Twitter: http://twitter.com/IEResearchNAFSA
Will be used primarily for tracking and sharing latest research in the field (my commentary: I’m a big fan of Twitter and it is where I get most of my international education related news and information and I have met some really great people that I look forward to meeting in person soon.)

RS Network on Facebook: http://bit.ly/b3Qp6G
Will be used primarily for networking with graduate students, although also for general discussion and tracking links. Anyone is welcome to post info, links, etc. (my commentary: I was slow to adopt Facebook into my new media toolbox but I really like “Fan pages” and use IHEC Blog’s Facebook page frequently)

RS Network "Notes": http://bit.ly/alV7HS

These will be short blog-style posts and thought-pieces published every so often.  Please let me know if you'd like to author a guest "note" or would like us to feature one of your own blog entries on our notes page. Our first guest entry is from David Comp, (indeed a re-post of his own blog entry), appropriately on "free international education resources" including social media resources. (my commentary: thanks Bryan for including my post as a guest entry!  I hope people find the list to be helpful and if anyone knows of other resources that should be added to the list please leave a comment on that post and I’ll take a look.  Additionally, I really like how Bryan is using the “Notes” section and will begin to adapt my Facebook use for IHEC Blog to include this practice!)

RS Network on Academia.edu: http://bit.ly/d6E45g

Academia.edu is a fairly new site, a kind of "Facebook for professors." We created a research area called "NAFSA Graduate Studies in International Education" but there are a host of other research interests related to international education to follow as well. (my commentary: I have had a profile on Academia.edu for some time now [needs some updating] and I really like it.  It provides some interesting and useful metrics for me personally and has allowed me to connect with some other great people I most likely would not have connected with otherwise)

my commentary: Some more great things happening in the NAFSA Research and Scholarship Network (and the NAFSA Teaching, Learning and Scholarship Knowledge Community as a whole) and I recommend joining all of their networks to be plugged in [again...they are free]!  I'll be posting soon about something interesting and hopefully informative that is scheduled for next week on the Research & Scholarship Network and you need to subscribe to check it out.