Digitally agile research

When my old friend and former colleague Oliver Quinlan invited me to write a chapter for his new book, I didn't need to take long to decide. The title of the book itself was enough to convince me to participate in the project. The book finally arrived through my letter box yesterday, and I'm glad I did take part.

The slim volume (140 pp), edited by Oliver and Natalia Kucirkova (Senior Research Fellow at University College London), is published by McGraw Hill and draws on the experience and knowledge of a raft of digitally agile researchers, scholars and journalists, including Christian Payne (you will know him on Twitter as @documentally), Victoria Pearson, Carl Gombrich, Ian O'Byrne, Gemma Ware and Mark Russell. 

There are chapters on open scholarship, academic blogging, the use of smartphone and tablets, crowdsourcing data, developing a digital profile, getting started with Twitter, personal learning networks, and leveraging the power of social media, as well as my own chapter on 'Using social media for action research: the benefits and limitations'. 

It's a book that provides essential reading for all academics in a time where digital, mobile and social media technologies are an increasingly important part of the research equation.  Each chapter also presents Common Pitfalls and Best Practice panes to support the texts. To quote the sleeve of the book: "With a range of helpful strategies, The Digitally Agile Researcher is a credible and practical guide for academics at all stages of their career, doctoral students, early careers researchers or experienced academics." 

Digitally agile research by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.