"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" update

We ran this course again this term, this time with much more success (i.e. it ran!) and it was a fun class. As well as those who attended, I had a lot of email enquiries about future dates and we are running it next term as part of Employability Week.

Before the session ran, I checked the content and found that Facebook has altered its privacy tools, removing the extremely handy interactive tools that we used to recommend. The URL still works (annoyingly) but if you click on the link to "Preview your Profile" you now get a page not found error... The way to preview your profile is now done from your Timeline. There is a little settings icon which has a "View as" option.

You can choose the Public view or the view of a specific friend - you have lost the ability to view as "Friend of friend" which used to be handy. I can see that this must have become unwieldy as the greater levels of customization for items and lists but it's still a great shame to have lost this option.

"Preview your Public Search Profile" also takes you to a Help page with fresh instructions on the (much more complicated) way to do it. Having followed those instructions, the resulting page has a very plain URL:
https://www.facebook.com/samantha.oakley?p
Perhaps one can just use that URL as a short cut, replaced with your own username? Maybe someone can try it and let me know!

Anyway, all this meant re-vamping our teaching materials and I noticed today that another change to Facebook's privacy settings is being rolled out imminently so that will mean another update. The ever-changing Facebook privacy mess is a pain - it's tough to help our students monitor their online profile on a regular basis with inconsistent tools.

'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.

Best source of free images? My top 2 sites.

Having wrestled with producing a conference presentation today, I found myself up against the clock trying to find suitable - and fun - images. I resist all most temptations to fly in the face of copyright so that means Google Image search is a no-go. In the past I've seen many sites recommended and have amassed a collection of bookmarks but, these days, when it comes down to it I'm just using these two. Mainly because I am most confident I understand their licence terms and I find they do the job:

Morguefile 
Pros: Images are free to use, including commercial use, and require no attribution. The least fuss option!
Cons: The site kept bombing out on me a bit today with intensive use but if you are patient, it seemed to work again. Also, not the widest selection of images - have to be creative with search terms. Some produce weird results!

Compfight
Do a search from the main page, then I usually opt for "Commercial" license.
Pros: I like the interface, searches well and you can scan results quickly; better standard of images than Morguefile.
Cons: you need to attribute. I don't mind this on presentations or blog posts but it can be messier on publicity materials. I've also had them subsequently re-used without attribution.

As an example, here are some ones I amassed when planning our "Managing your online presence" session for students. Aside from a couple of genericky ones, most of them are to illustrate what you wouldn't want a potential employer to find if they search for you on social media (the drunk dancing bunny-man is my favourite). I'm hoping to share all our materials on this and had the idea of using Pinterest to group the images as they aren't mine to share but could be helpful to locate. I've been really enjoying using Pinterest for arty stuff but this is my first time using it for work.

Do you have a favourite source of images? Let me know in the comments if so - tips gratefully received!