"Managing your online presence" 2013

Our library-led session for students on managing your online presence has been updated once more. It is never going to be a static topic! That's what makes it fun...but also keeps us on our toes as it needs a thorough check each time before running it. The benefit of this is it forces you to revisit the session and - hopefully! - make some improvements.

This time we were running the session as part of the University's Employability Week. It followed on nicely from a separate session on personal branding so I have a new branding slide where I discussed creating a consistent image and thinking about how you could bring out your personal brand online.

I have uploaded the latest version of the presentation onto Slideshare. Contact me if you'd like more info on what was being said but you'll get the gist.

Managing your online presence from Samantha Oakley

There is also a link to the worksheet (Word document) on the first slide which has links to additional resources. I did give out a paper version but the students worked off live links in the online version to save them typing in URLs too much. The original presentation used clicker questions but I had to omit those slides. Questions asked were dotted throughout:

1. Which social networks do you use? (FB / Twitter / LinkedIn / Other / None = multiple selections allowed)
2. What did you find [after checking FB & Google]? (Something worrying / Mostly harmless stuff / Nothing / Something you're proud of)
3. What sector are you currently aiming for? (Commercial/Business / Public sector (health, civil service, teaching etc.) / Academic / Arts/media )
4. Does an employer have the right to monitor what you do online? (Yes / No / Sometimes)

Let me know if you have suggestions or thoughts or comments!

'Managing your online presence' : Promoting Digital Literacy

I've just uploaded my presentation from the Welsh HE librarians conference at Gregynog to Slideshare (tweaked slightly as the original was mostly images):

Managing Your Online Presence - Promoting Digital Literacy

It's really a pitch to get librarians thinking about students' social media awareness and whether this could be part of our remit. I think it should! It's digital literacy and, if you consider what a great source of current awareness and resources it can be, it's an information literacy issue too.


I had already been thinking about this before the whole Liam Stacey/Twitter incident but when that news story broke it really brought it home to me how much we could do to help students think about their social media use. We have only really just started thinking about this at Swansea Uni and, as you can see from the presentation, our attempts to do something about it have been a bit two steps forward, one step back... Still, to continue a dodgy metaphor, it does feel like it's an idea with legs!

There was lots of positive reaction on the day - for which I was very grateful! I'd love to hear opinions / experiences from anyone doing or thinking of doing anything similar?

PS There's a link at the end to our teaching resources, shared under Creative Commons. We will be adding to these as we develop more stuff.