Lessons

1 | The communicator

Personal and professional branding practice

Understanding and articulating your value proposition

Students will learn how to brand (or rebrand) themselves for the job they are looking for and how to establish an online personal brand with a clear, consistent and authentic voice.

Main topics:

  • Why you should invest in your online presence 
  • How to tailor your credentials, expertise, and what’s visible to network connections and prospective employees.
  • How to rework your resume and make it connect to the job description
  • How reviews, comments, social media profiles, photos, and posts, shape search results and impact decisions and reputation.
  • How to design or consolidate your online identity and bring coherence to a fractured digital footprint.
  • How to build and optimize a network that can lead to jobs or other work-related opportunities.
  • How to optimize your LinkedIn profile for better visibility.

Suggested reading and resources

research papers, up-to-date reviews, reports, web resources

For full access to all resources you need to be enrolled in this course.
2 | The Information

A small exploration of the Googlization of memory lecture

Information seeking across Internet and traditional communication channels

Main topics:

  • What the internet can tell us about the society
  • the scope of google algorithms update effects, and how they can affect your website
  • Information seeking across Internet and traditional communication channels and how to navigate information and misinformation
  • How Google is changing the “publish or perish” mantra into “be visible or vanish”

3 | The Media

Social media technologies lecture

Main topics

  • How digital communication technologies have changed the game and which are the digital technologies driving the future of social media
  • How technology and Social Media are changing the Publishing Industry and how are digital information produced and consumed.
  • Social media platforms overview. How to select the appropriate digital and social media tools to achieve one’s goal.
    • Blog: Risk and benefits of science blogging (and why it still matters).  Indie, collaborative and guest blogging, and blog networks
    • Twitter: The scholarly Twittersphere. How and with whom scientist communicate on social media
    • Instagram: Ways to use the Instagram medium to promote science and science education

4 | The Public

Social networks practice

Audience segmentation and analysis

This workshop includes a combination of teaching, interactive activities, individual exercises and discussions. Students will be encouraged to get involved and create their own target persona profiles and information seeking journeys.

Main topics:

  • The different audiences of science communication
  • how to understand who your audience is and what kind of content you should be producing,
  • How to develop a target persona
  • How to use Reddit, Quora and Forums to create useful reader personas

5 | The message

Creating, managing and curating content practice

Main topics:

  • How to create content that actually resonates with your readers
  • How to optimize your content for SEO pourposes
  • How to optimize your content for mobile users
  • How to write research-based blog-posts
  •  Experimenting with different headlines and finding strong keywords that are practical and entertaining

Course Details

This class helps students develop methods of analysis and critical thinking to understand the complexities and contradictions of social media and gain cutting-edge knowledge of key developments in the emerging technologies and their wider societal causes and consequences.
Students will also learn to identify and analyse social network characteristics to establish the potential of social networking technologies in specific contexts and domains, and how to approach digital science communication and social media engagement activities with the public, while avoiding potential pitfalls.

Cristina Rigutto
Language: english
20 Hours