Something Extra - Social media for social policy

[Matt Cornock] In the final weeks of the Summer Term we run a mini-course called 'Social Media for Social Policy', it's an optional series of workshops which is available to all social science students at the University. Students work in groups and they will produce a piece of creative work which aims to engage or inform a specific audience on a specific social issue. Colleagues from Careers help us out by establishing groups and helping you plan your project and at the very end they'll come back and they'll help you review what you've learnt so you can present it in the best possible way to future employers. There will be workshops throughout, run by myself and colleagues from the Elearning Development Team, on audio and video editing, on copyright and how you can best present your work, best communicate to others. At the very end there's a showcase which allows you to present all your work to the other groups and you'll get some feedback from them as well. [Megan O'Kane] This summer I undertook the 'Social Media for Social Policy' course to learn a little bit more about how social media and social policy can fit together. Like, how companies can now use Facebook and Twitter to get their message across and use different tools, such as Prezi. In my workplace I taught a group of colleagues how to use Prezi in the workplace and also, I did that via video link to our other office in the South. So there were about a 110 people listening to how to use Prezi, but I found it was very beneficial because they now use it in all of their presentations when they're either presenting in the workplace or going out to schools and youth groups and organisations to make their presentations more efficient. You need to really think about what your main message is, the best way to convey that, and the most appropriate way to convey it to an audience. That all has to be done before you even start giving a presentation - you need to have that from day one. I personally wasn't very technologically advanced before I did the course, I'd never used a video camera and the audio equipment. The important thing is that you must do tests(!) before you go in, because the worst thing is going into an interview situation where you've asked someone to give up their time for you and for them then to be standing around waiting while you're trying to learn how to work the camera on the spot! We showed our video and took a real question and answer session from the other students which we thought was really beneficially, because if they could feedback to us that they didn't like this part of the video but they did really like this part, we can learn for the next time what works, what doesn't work. It was for a student audience so we were working with people who were on a similar knowledge as us, but we know that if we were to go into schools and talk about, for example about being NEET, we'd need to re-evaluate the way we're presenting it. [Matt Cornock] We hope it's going to be engaging and interesting, and you'll learn something new along the way as well. And, to find out more and to see some examples from previous projects, we have those linked on our web pages.