Thing 17: Sharing your Work

Thing 17 introduced us to some collaborative tools which allow for sharing of work. SlideShare is a free online facility to upload and share your presentations with a wider audience. ResearchGate allows you to create a Researcher profile and share your research with others in the field. It is a good way to network with other researchers. Open Educational Resources (OER) allows educationalists to share teaching materials and you can contribute to resource banks such as the JISC store in the UK. These contain a wealth of information and are useful starting point to see what has already been done on a particular subject rather than inventing the wheel.

Another way of collaborating and connecting with peers is via presenting at conferences, seminars and networking events. One can also sharing your work via submitting to a journal or contributing to a blog.

For me, I tend to share my work more locally. For example, via LENUS, the online health repository, I submit our open access documents which allows engagement with a wider audience. I also contribute articles to our membership journal, Forum. I do attend conferences, seminars and networking events but I have never presented at one of these events. It has made me realise that perhaps I do need to step out of my comfort zone and put myself more out there. I do see the benefit of the online collaborative tools but am hesitant to contribute myself. One that I have signed on to is ResearchGate as I was involved in a systematic review and this was a good place to share the research. We were hoping to get a paper out of this but so far this has not materialised. This Thing has made me realise that this is an area I need to work on.