ABSTRACT
In higher education, professional online identities have become increasingly important for building and maintaining reputation. Ironically, given the importance of digital identities to job searches, the promotion and distribution of scholarly work, pedagogical innovation, and many other components of an academic life, higher education professionals receive little to no training about how to best represent themselves in a digital space. Usability statistics from some of the more popular social media and media sharing sites provide clear evidence of the pervasiveness of these online environments, as evident in the following examples from five popular online platforms—Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Alternative metrics, called altmetrics, involve the use of information from social media to measure the impact of scholarly work. Still relatively new in the digital landscape, altmetrics are a contested space. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
