A proper introduction appears below, but if you've already watched/read that or if you are ready to start, simply visit the course Modules and start at the top!

October 20 to November 16, 2014.

Instructor: George Veletsianos, PhD
Royal Roads University

The course has a dedicated hashtag: #scholar14. If you are on Twitter,
feel free to contribute resources, thoughts, and comments using the hashtag.

This course is appropriate for MA/PhD students, researchers, academics, and other knowledge workers. The course introduces you to the tools and practices associated with academics’ participation in online social networks. Scholars who make use of participatory technologies and online social networks to share, improve, validate, and further their scholarship engage in what my colleagues and I have defined as networked participatory scholarship. My research on this topic is available here and over the next few weeks I will be guiding you through an examination of various areas relating to this topic.

By the end of the course I hope that you will be better informed about the role of social media in the lives of knowledge workers and academics, be able to have an informed conversation about this topic with your colleagues, and decide whether and to what extend you personally might use social media for academic purposes.

There are two parts to this course that I want to highlight:

First, I want this course to be about you and your needs, and not just what I think are significant areas to understand. Therefore, I will be asking you to articulate your own goals for taking this course so that you can evaluate your progress towards your accomplishments. For example, you might already know some of the challenges that academics face when they participate on social media so you might want to spend more time investigating the relationship between academic freedom and social media. That's absolutely fine! Or, you might be interested in investigating the claims that are made about social media and the degree to which empirical evidence supports those claims. This is absolutely fine, too!

Second, even though I have experience with and actively do research on networked scholarship, there are a number of other people who have experience with these topics. Diversity of opinion is important, and for this reason, each week an expert guest will be joining us in a live event to discuss the topic of the week and answer questions via Google Hangouts on Air. Even though this event will be live and you will be able to view it in real-time and ask questions, it will also be recorded for those of you who can't make it.

"This sounds great! What next?"

You can consult the syllabus for a more extensive description of the course, or, if you are ready to start, click on Modules and start at the top! Don't forget to introduce yourself to the rest of the group! You can also navigate to Modules using the link that is available on the left side navigation panel.