networking online

and finally, I went to a session on improving your LinkedIn profile in 5 easy steps, which are:
create - compelling profiles that include your accomplishments and success
connect - to the people you already know and the people you would like to know based on personal interests and professional associations. 
contribute - communicate, comment and share insights
congratulate - sincerely recognize and applaud the success of others
craft - your settings so you are making the most out the tool
and finally commit - to daily progress.  

dress code = pajamas?

The next quick take session I attended was about teleworking, a topic close to my heart... as I worked from home between 2006 - 2009 (and yes, I did work in my pajamas sometimes). 

The presenter spoke of the mandate of her company to reduce greenhouses gases, so they encourage all employees to work from home at least one day a week.  The company offers a flexible schedule that they believe improves morale and helps to attract and retain staff. 

Staff members participate online in meetings through Link, which enables video conferencing and chat. 

Considerations: technical issues as well as social issue such as: out of sight, out of mind and the challenge of building relationships with your co-workers.  The presenter encouraged enlisting small talk and similar check-ins with your colleagues that build connections even at a distance.

measure your impact

The next quick take session that I attended was on the basics of altmetrics.  The presenter noted that scholarly impact measures are based on activity in online tools and environments such as citations.  Metrics are a proxy for scholarly influence which take a long time to accumulate.  Negative considerations: journals could be hidden in subscription based journals; the metrics don't capture the publications overall impact and the challenge of variability in the measure tools themselves.

Altmetrics indicators:

• journal article use
• social media use - blogs, Twitter (# of Tweets about conference presentation), copy of article saved in Mendeley (# of saves)
• data and software use and re-use
• educational resource use and re-use - i.e.: slide share or Prezi 
• broader impacts for research (readership)

Caveat: how do weight each of these indicators, are they equal or are some weighted more heavily than others.

Altmetrics measures diverse impacts by various tools to track readership and impact, such as: academia.edu, CiteULike, F1000, Google Scholar, Mendeley and Zotero.  Items that add value to traditionally published content include: crowdsourced peer review, and the exposure of questions and comments via social media.

Altmetrics tools include Altmetrics.com, Plum Analytics, Mendeley, Impact Story (which considers citation patterns in a particular field) and ORCID (which is aiming to unify author profiles). 

We are talking big, big data that is!

I had the most interesting conference experience ever yesterday.  I literally flew into Vancouver in the morning, attended 4 quick take sessions, did a presentation and flew home.  I snuck a lovely walk on the waterfront as well... but don't tell anyone.

The first quick take session I attended was entitled Big Data.  Presenters were given 15 minutes to discuss their topic.

The speaker started off by stating "Google has always been a database so start using it as such".  He also recommended that you use LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. to harvest known information about your community or your potential community.

• Hard Data - location, employer, job title... no one lies about this information and it tells you a little bit about the Who
• Soft Data - likes and interests

He also stated that the words used in a profile can be used to create a trends forecast as most of these social media tools have search functionality built into them.  You can use big data in correlation with other information sources.