Abstract
Studying and Researching with Social Media offers a timely and much needed handbook for students thinking about how social media can enhance their student experience and potential employability at a later date. The book provides an excellent account of the emergence and importance of social media whilst fundamentally focusing on the range of social media available for the modern student and potentially offering new thoughts on the use of social media in teaching for the academic audience. By strategically structuring the book into four discrete elements, the reader is engaged in a walk through process covering what appears to be all elements of social media directly relevant for the budding student learner. The book opens with an interesting history of the emergence of social media and draws the reader into wanting to find out more about how they can benefit from such technologies. The second section then moves on to present four dominant forms of social media and offers a comprehensive account to the student as to why they might want to engage with these. Section three offers a more pragmatic focus on the utilisation of social media for individual promotion and productivity in building an online presence. Finally, the fourth section of the book provides the reader with an account of the complexities and issues of using social media for research and offers some of the legal context.
In its focus, the book offers a pragmatic account of the range of strengths and weaknesses of using social media for the developing student, which would be useful for almost all students embarking on their journey into higher education. For me it offered a very comprehensive account of the ways in which social media can enhance teaching practice and techniques. In this sense, for the academic audience the book potentially offers an in-depth course on how and why social media is a useful resource in contemporary teaching practice. It also offers more general tips on internet use that whilst being rather simple, were issues often given little consideration (for example, from the use of a ‘baseline’ password from which you establish a unique password for all online accounts, to hyperlink etiquette). In addition, the book also challenged my long established dislike of ‘Wikis’, particularly the use of these by students, to help me think differently about such resources and to explore what potential uses they have for student engagement and learning.
From a research perspective the book was slightly disappointing as the title Studying and Researching with Social Media appears a little misleading. Whilst the ‘studying’ element was certainly there throughout, there was little about ‘researching’ with social media. In terms of what I expected from the title, the book did not live up to the expectations of helping researchers consider social media as a rich resource of data and offering guidance on formulating a research project using social media. Chapter five on Social Networks did have a section on ‘research focus’ but this focused on profile building as opposed to ‘researching’ and the aforementioned chapter also had a ‘data collection’ section but this was documenting the extent to which the social network sites collect user information as opposed to collecting data for research.
Overall then, this is an extremely comprehensive book which covers a range of very interesting points for both the existing student looking to make the most of social media in their studies, and the academic looking for inspiration as to how to use social media to inspire and engage their student cohort. It is however not a book concerned by researching with social media.