mama I have attended several conferences in my life. Some inspiring, some boring, some well organised and some a terribly mess. I have also not attended a lot of conferences in my life. Either due to lack of funding or lack of time. Conferences which were not relevant enough or where only one session was really interesting. I have sometimes wished that I could use some Harry Potter tricks and through a portkey transport myself around the world to participate in one session and then hurry home again. Or use a time-turner so I could go back in time and not miss out on a parallel session to the session I chose to attend.
Portkeys and time-turners are to my knowledge still not widely spread, but then the next best thing might work: Twitter. Conferences are a different thing when Twitter is involved – both for the good and for the bad. My first conference Twitter experience was at Science Online London 2011 and I must say I was quickly hooked.
Now Lisa Harris and Nicole Beale from University of Southampton have decided to investigate how social networking can change the conversation at academic conferences. They just finished collecting tweets and photos and videos and are ready to analyse. I’d recommend reading their blog post “If you don’t have social media, your are no one: How social media enriches conferences for some but risk isolating others” on the LSE blog Impact of Social Sciences. There are some nice reflections on the good and bad sides of Twitter for conferences.
And if you haven’t tested out your conference Twitter legs yet, do give it a try.
public health science communication
Transforming academic conferences through Twitter
I have attended several conferences in my life. Some inspiring, some boring, some well organised and some a terribly mess. I have also not attended a lot of conferences in my life. Either due to lack of funding or lack of time. Conferences which were not relevant enough or where only one session was really interesting. […]
