Get Involved in 'The Conversation'
The Conversation is a website which features news and views, sourced from the academic and research community. A team of professional editors works with university experts to unlock their knowledge for use by the wider public.
A number of FEDUA academic staff have already contributed articles to the website including Lecturer in Education, Deborah Trevallion on Olympic swimmers 'fast-suits', Head of the School of Education, Jenny Gore on reforming teacher quality and PVC John Germov on the slow food movement.
As an author, you are able to login to an account and monitor the readership statistics of your article. For example, the recent article by John Germov has had over 5750 individual page views, 54 comments, 70 tweets and 76 Facebook likes.
Members of academic or research institutions can sign up to be an author for The Conversation by filling out an online form.
The University is hosting two editors from The Conversation, Jane Rawson (Energy & Environment) and Reema Rattan (Health & Medical). These visits are an important opportunity for you to learn more about ways you can proactively build your reputation and raise your profile through The Conversation. Please put the following dates in your diary:
Monday 6 May (9am-11am) NIER Board Room - Jane Rawson, Section Editor for energy and the environment.
Wednesday 22 May (9am-11am) - HMRI Lecture Theatre - Reema Rattan, Section Editor for health and medicine.
Following this open session, there will be a limited number of one-on-one sessions available with the editors. If you would like to book an individual meeting with Jane or Reema, please contact the Media and PR team on 4921 5577.
Senior Lecturer in Education, Nicole Mockler has also written an article on teacher performance reviews, and says the Conversation provides a great way for academics to share their work both within and beyond the academic community, and to contribute to public discourse in their area.
"It's possible to 'pitch' a story to the website or to be commissioned by one of their editors for a story that is in some way related to a current issue that's been reported on in the news. The editorial support is very good - editors are responsible for a specific discipline area, and my experience of the Education editor is that she's excellent, both to bounce ideas off and to provide some clever editing to help you stay within the ball-park of the word limit (which is usually about 750 words)," Nicole said.
You can also sign up to receive the Conversation website newsletter to stay on top of the latest topics being discussed.