Nature’s Network
By Ally October 18th, 2007
In Networking · Social media · Stories · e-learning
My recent research for RMM has revolved around education, with the main focal point being e-learning. One thing that has caught my eye and imagination is the Nature Network (NN), a specialised social network that connects scientists at a global and local level.
Writing in the Education Guardian, Jessica Shephard discusses the rise of the NN – ‘welcome to Facebook for professors, postdocs and PhDers in the sciences.’ NN is not just a professor’s facebook though, it’s more specialised. The basic function of NN is to bring scientists from around the world together, socially. Once on there, scientists are encouraged to talk, share their work and discuss the latest scientific news and events.
I personally think this type of social network is really cool. It provides a very niche social network for scientists who are hungry for all levels of scientific information, discussions and contacts.
NN seem to have a first mover advantage in the market; subscription in the UK is above 10, 000 and worldwide users in the hundreds of thousands. Have NN opened the doors for other academic subjects to create their own social networks? After all, the online social networking market is massive; surely it can’t be long till we start to see more specialised networks in academia?
1 Matt Rebeiro // Oct 18, 2007 at 7:27 pm
I wonder how many academic networks already exist online but in Forums. My guess is there is probably quite a lot and that we’ll probably see, as you’ve quite rightly suggested, more and more academic niches migrating onto a broader more user friendly system. Web 2.0 eh - its marvellous!
2 Dan O'Connor // Oct 19, 2007 at 12:31 am
It’s terribly antedeluvian, but most of us social scientists still use listserves (I know!) for online communications. I’m at the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities annual conference right now (my glamorous Hollywood lifestyle etc etc) and just attended a session on ‘new media’… it’s startling really, how far some of us academics are behind the curve. I might even blog about it later…