Why teach a fish to swim? A design-based research study incorporating social media into the professional writing curriculum to shape professional practice and identity

Research has found that professional communicators are not prepared for the challenges that social media presents and face a number of barriers due to a lack of social media knowledge and skills. Correspondingly, higher education has failed to include enough social media and online content to provide learners with the necessary skills for professional practice. Furthermore, the neoliberal objective to shape a flexible workforce has engendered a new form of professionalism that tasks individuals with developing an incorporated branded self. Within the framework of the higher education curriculum, social media can perform two roles for learners: foster workforce competences and provide an authentic community of practice to comodify their brand. The issue for educators is that no comprehensive studies have fully examined the incorporation of a social media component into a professional writing course, identifying the barriers, skills, and processes that facilitate or foster the professionalization of the tools for learners and enable them to use these technologies both appropriately and strategically. This dissertation employed a design-based research methodology to systematically study how to design an effective learning environment for the integration of social media technologies and addressed the following research questions: • What problems might educators face when integrating social media practices into the curriculum? • How can social media technologies facilitate professional identity formation to bridge the transition from the everyday practices of learners to professional practices? The study spanned the time period 2012-2016 and involved the developing, testing, investigating, and refining of a yearlong professional writing course, which included the tools, curriculum, activities, software, and theoretical constructs for the course design (Reeves, 2006, p. 58). The results indicated that students lacked agency on social networks and required guidance when articulating modes of online authenticity. The final iteration of the course design effectively produced a virtual community of practice, as measured through learning analytics, and provided a means to shape professional social media practices and foster professional identity

Data to inform a social media component for professional development and practices: A design-based research study

This DIB article includes the course artefacts, instruments, survey data, and descriptive statistics, along with in-depth correlational analysis for the first iteration of a design-based research study on designing curriculum for developing online professional identity and social media practices for a multi-major advanced professional writing course. Raw data was entered into SPSS software. For interpretation and discussion, please see the original article entitled, “Designing curriculum to shape professional social media skills and identity in virtual communities of practice” (J. Novakovich, S. Miah, S. Shaw, 2017) [1]

Developing a scalable framework for partnerships between health agencies and the Wikimedia ecosystem

In this era of information overload and misinformation, it is a challenge to rapidly translate evidence-based health information to the public. Wikipedia is a prominent global source of health information with high traffic, multilingual coverage, and acceptable quality control practices. Viewership data following the Ebola crisis and during the COVID-19 pandemic reveals that a significant number of web users located health guidance through Wikipedia and related projects, including its media repository Wikimedia Commons and structured data complement, Wikidata.The basic idea discussed in this paper is to increase and expedite health institutions' global reach to the general public, by developing a specific strategy to maximize the availability of focused content into Wikimedia’s public digital knowledge archives. It was conceptualized from the experiences of leading health organizations such as Cochrane, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other United Nations Organizations, Cancer Research UK, National Network of Libraries of Medicine, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Each has customized strategies to integrate content in Wikipedia and evaluate responses.We propose the development of an interactive guide on the Wikipedia and Wikidata platforms to support health agencies, health professionals and communicators in quickly distributing key messages during crisis situations. The guide aims to cover basic features of Wikipedia, including adding key health messages to Wikipedia articles, citing expert sources to facilitate fact-checking, staging text for translation into multiple languages; automating metrics reporting; sharing non-text media; anticipating offline reuse of Wikipedia content in apps or virtual assistants; structuring data for querying and reuse through Wikidata, and profiling other flagship projects from major health organizations.In the first phase, we propose the development of a curriculum for the guide using information from prior case studies. In the second phase, the guide would be tested on select health-related topics as new case studies. In its third phase, the guide would be finalized and disseminated