The Dean's View; a lay person's view on the importance of 'twitterisation'

This week; a guest spot. Huge thanks to Sally Bentley, Executive Dean of Education and Sport & Health and Social Sciences, who shares her insight into social media

I suspect that neither most of my faculty executive, nor the vast majority of my portfolio leaders across HSS and E&S have ever been on Twitter. We don’t really understand it - being of the email generation - and most of us haven’t even got a Facebook account let alone those other social media apps that we hear about. Indeed we are rather proud to be able to use the word app without putting inverted commas around it in an embarrassed way.

That said we know it's important and so we listen when anyone briefs us (as happened at Senior Leaders' Team last year) and we try to get ourselves better informed (inviting Claudia to present to Faculty Executive Group on a couple of occasions). We write actions into plans and monitor their progress – noting that not much has changed and doing a bit of mea culpa along the way. We appoint staff to lead on School Twitter accounts and exhort everyone to share stories.

So far so good, and let’s not mock the progress we’ve made, but we’ve plateaued and this blog is to explore the blockage. The slight fly in the ointment is it is written from the perspective of naïve ignorance, but that’s never stopped me before so here goes. 

Some accounts are thriving and have for a while now – the School of Sport Science and Physical Activity (SSPA) for example. Why is that: perhaps the subject is more photogenic and the activities of broader appeal?  I’m convinced about the former but not the latter. Do the staff have a younger demographic? Or is it just about Claudia’s personal/professional connections with the sports staff that gets people participating? I suspect a bit of both.

Other accounts have stalled – Education exists but isn’t flying high. Why not? In Education Studies key members of staff have left or are off on leave. Then there is Teacher Education (TE) which of course is a Professional, Statutory and Regulatory Body (PSRB) and they get special exemption don’t they because PSRBs are different. Or are they? Do the rest even tweet at all?  So what else is the problem … Are the stories less tweetable?

Maybe that tells us something about the engaging outward facing nature of the subject area and the interesting activities embedded in the curriculum. Are these staff less well-connected, less out-and-about? If any of the above that would be disappointing. Okay so let’s speak the unspeakable - is the subject more ‘boring’? Surely that can’t be the case; what would get you more worked up, your kid failing at school or your sport team playing on Sunday? Are we being lazy – there are plenty of stories to be had out there aren’t there? For example, why aren’t we tweeting this week on ‘parents’ being marked on the support they give their child? Scary thought! Can we piggy back a tweet on every local or national news story about education?   

So we’ve managed to get some stories to our twitter leads, how well do we do with them?  Sport’s got it cracked. It has pictures and friends and networks that bounce things around. They’ve got it easy, you might say, there’s a culture that’s alive and kicking.

And Education? We only need to be better than our competitors in Education – not in sport. So let’s be canny. Almost any picture of children or adults learning, talking in groups, reading, writing, playing, running, jumping, looking happy, looking worried, thinking etc can represent any story, so how hard can it be to take pictures that don’t infringe personal identity but provide us with a bank of pictures that ostensibly represent the topic in question? Or can we send text messages to staff every week asking for their photo of the week and award a decent prize for the one that produces the best 3 in a month?

Next barrier: ‘I don’t have any networks on Twitter’ who will re-tweet my stories. How can we help people? Here I’m too ignorant to even suggest anything, but you will know a way. Should we be tweeting on other people’s accounts? Is there a list of good blogs that we can point staff at? Can we link up with our students in some ways?

And then there’s this funny little creature the # ! Okay, I confess, I just had to search my keyboard to find the little blighter. I know he’s important, and yes, for me, he’s a he, but I never know what to do with him when I’ve found him, just that it was important. Over to you, I’ve found him, what shall I do with him?

So Claudia and the central team continue to browse the world of tweets and trying to cajole us to take our first steps in the world of twitter, while most of us prefer the safety of crawling on all fours. The good news is that we all learn to walk sooner or later.

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