Video: Crafting a Professional Digital Identity
Presentation for digitalVU month — Social media’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, and so on — give us plenty of opportunities to share our thoughts online. However, these platforms can sometimes make it hard to know just how public our comments are, as a Dartmouth religion professor found out recently when some comments she made on Facebook about her students and her colleagues turned out to be very public and very embarrassing. What we share on social media sites can turn up in unexpected places, like the family photo shared on a personal blog that showed up in a storefront window display in Prague. And given our students’ greater use of and familiarity with social media, instructors can often find navigating this world — one that mixes the public and private — somewhat daunting.
In this session, staff from University Web Communications share strategies for using social media in ways that will enhance and not damage your professional identity, drawing from Vanderbilt’s Social Media Handbook. How can you know if your students can see your status updates on Facebook? Should you “friend” your students on Facebook? Should you “connect” with them on LinkedIn? How can you use blogs and Twitter to share your teaching experiences online in ways that reflect well on you professionally? This session will help you learn to shape what your students and colleagues find out about when they Google you.
View the Center for Teaching blog post about this session.