I have a confession to make: I am a 31-year old anti-e-social conservative. Admittedly, I do have a Facebook account, but that is more or less where it ends. I don’t tweet/facebook/instagram/WhatsApp that I’m going to bed, I borrow books from the university library (“Don’t you want the eBook?” the girl behind the counter asked) and I bring paper articles onto planes. Why this confession? Well, over the past few months I have heard at three academic meetings that social media is the new thing and that I shouldn’t miss the boat! I first heard this at a time management workshop. The best advice they could give me concerning managing teaching load was to make a Facebook-group. This would give the students the opportunity to answer their peers’ questions, saving me a lot of time and work. Personally, I think peer-to-peer interaction is very important and useful. But is this the best way to go? Students seem less restained on the Internet and am I, as moderator of the Facebook-group, responsible for inappropriate messages? And does this mean that I have to monitor the group-page 24/7? Are there already university policies on this and what are they? It could change the way I teach and interact with students. But will it really reduce my teaching load? The second time I heard this sentiments was at the SIAM focus group meeting for young academics at Snowbird. We were discussing how SIAM could be improved. There was the obvious idea: “More money for young academics. (Yes, please!)”. But I was shocked by the myriad ideas involving some sort of “social medium”. From Apps for tracking down who goes to the same mini-symposia as you (to identify potential collaborators) and Apps for showing you all SIAM members in your district (to arrange meetings) to instant updates for cancellations and no-shows. I was astonished. Finally, and referring back to the title, your favorite portal (red: DSWeb) is changing to a new content management system and, most importantly, it will be possible to incorporate social media into the portal in the future. In my role as portal editor-in-chief I will have regular contact with SIAM about what we, as community want, how it should look, and what the new portal should be able to do. However, as mentioned, I am not tech savvy, so any new ideas for the portal are welcome! Should we have Twitter integration on the portal (see for example http://www.physics.org)? Should we facilitate Facebook groups for every Snowbird meeting? Let me know what you think!

Peter van Heijster

New ideas can be mailed to Peter van Heijster!