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Student Academic Partnership Media Employability 2.0
Vanessa Jackson [email protected] Harte [email protected]: Luke Seager, Jonathan
Bridgewater, Hannah Ustel
School of Media, Birmingham City University
How are students using social media to network with the media industry?
What does this tell us about shifting media employability skills?
What would a teaching resource look like?
Research Context
SAP –
Student/Academic Partnership
Surveyed/interviewed undergraduates from all years on BA (Hons) Media and Communications
Postgraduates from a broad range of practice / theory Media MAs
“I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately”
Marwick/Boyd (2010) –
“individuals conceptualise an imagined audience evoked through their
tweets”
Examine the “constructed nature of socially meaningful behaviour, and in turn the key concepts
of warranting, practices, and emergent identity.” (Holmes 2006)
What ‘audience management’
strategies do students utilise?
Employability Research
Previous research (2000‐03) examined media employability. Surveyed 500 students.
Students develop valuable critical, intellectual and general skills on their courses from
research for presentations
project management
production work
Research Outcomes
Understand use of social media by media students and develop coherent and useful curriculum resources to support them
Questionnaire
320 respondents (from about 400 possible respondents)
Undergraduate Year 1 41.7%
Undergraduate Year 2 24.7%
Undergraduate Year 3 24%
Post graduate 9.6%
95% use Facebook
daily
59% use YouTube daily
1st
years don’t use Twitter much
Use is progressive:
1st
years: 94% did not use it at all
2nd
years: 80.9%
3rd
years: 60.6% of 3rd Years and
Postgraduates: 44.8%
Specialist use
Vimeo
Soundcloud
Flickr
Use much less – for storage rather than networking
Which platform to use?
Why use them?
Do you moderate your profile?
Connecting with industry
Finding Placements
24% had been successful in finding placements or paid work, fairly equally split between years
Following then applying
Qualitative Research – 4 Focus Gps
• Personal versus Professional‘ I tend to use Facebook
for the more social side of it,
and Twitter for the more professional side of it. My profile on Twitter and Facebook
are really different’
(1st
Year)
• Reality‘social media is a massive construction …..everything in
social media you select…you’re picking the highlights….and you can create this online persona of
who you are. I think it’s mad sometimes.’
(3rd
Year)
Online Etiquette
‘if there’s an opportunity for a placement or a job, that you do that formally through email or writing in to
them, that you don’t send an in‐box message and say, hi, do you remember me and can I have that
placement or whatever, because that isn’t considered the done thing.’
(MA student)
‘because it was on Facebook, it made me question the legitimacy of it.’
(1st
Year)
Negative posts
‘He slagged
him off quite a lot, said he was addicted to drugs and stuff, which was all untrue. He then spoke to someone at Radio 1, to try and get some work
experience. They saw that he was on Twitter, went on that, saw a link to his blog, went on that, read the
blog and basically told him where to go’. (2nd
Year)
Creating rather than Consuming
• Having something to say:‘if you’re interesting then people will follow you, and if
you’re not, no one will care’. (3rd
Year)
• Digital native:‘it’s quite novel for people in industry at the moment to
see how we’re emerging as the sort of digital native, that are used to this platform and know how to
interact with people on it.’
(2nd
Year)
Bonding and Bridging Social Capital
• Bonding social capital ‐
Facebook:‘really useful for Uni
stuff, because everybody uses it, so
even if they don’t text you back, they will look on Facebook. It’s easier to talk as a group rather than
individuals.’
(2nd
Year)
• Bridging social capital ‐
Twitter:
‘A PR agency in Birmingham keep tweeting me and saying, will you please come for a placement, we want to do this, this and this’
(2nd
Year)
• Networking on and offline important
Views regarding Teaching Materials
‘We’re all using it (social media), we’ve all got work placements out of it. It should be a
really important part of a University undergrad course,’
(3rd
Year)
‘We’ve used our initiative about how to use it, but if everyone started doing that, it wouldn’t
have the same initiative, it wouldn’t have the same purpose as it used to.’
(2nd
Year)
http://socialmediatutorials.co.uk
• Assembled a team of Web & New Media students and Television students to create
resources
• Short videos and blog posts• Website
• Creative commons licensed
• Open Educational Resource
http://socialmediatutorials.co.uk
Future
• How can we make the project sustainable?
• Research to measure effectiveness?– Using social media in the workplace
– Mapping networks