Tag: professionalization

Social Media Workshop on Professionalization and Pedagogy, May 12, 2015, 3:00-4:00PM

Twitter_logo_blueToday, I’m leading a workshop on social media as a tool for professionalization and as a tool for pedagogy. I am including some of the details from the workshop flyer below. You can download the flyer here: ellis-jason-socialmedia-workshop and my workshop notes here: ellis-jason-social-media-workshop.

Social Media Workshop on Professionalization and Pedagogy

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

3:00PM-4:00PM

Namm 321 Conference Room

Organizer: Jason W. Ellis | Email: jellis at citytech dot cuny dot edu | Twitter: @dynamicsubspace

Social media is an increasingly important communication tool for our students and us. We are integrating it into our daily practices, and it, like any new communication medium, is changing the way we think and connect with others.

As scholars, we can leverage social media to promote our research, share ideas with colleagues, and collaborate on projects and network building. As educators, we can guide and mentor our students in responsible and meaningful ways of using social media.

In this workshop, we will discuss several popular social media platforms that we can use in our professionalization and pedagogy, and develop rhetorically grounded strategies for using social media as scholars and educators.

Some of the professional strategies discussed will include: sharing and promoting our work, and establishing and maintaining professional networks. Some of the pedagogical areas addressed will include: composition, and professional and technical writing.

Please bring your questions, ideas, and experiences, or if you can’t make it, let’s continue the discussion online!

Discussion topics and other resources are listed on the reverse side.

Some Topics for Discussion:

  • Rhetoric and Multimodality (WOVEN: written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal)
  • Audience(s)
  • Network Building (breadth versus depth)
  • Risk Assessment
  • Online Identity, Metadata, and Commodification of the Self
  • Managing an Emergent Online Identity
  • Social Media Assignments for Composition and Technical Communication
  • Personal versus Professional Spheres, or Is There a Division?
  • Assignment Ideas
  • Reflection Exercises

Some Social Media Platforms Discussed:

Resources Discussed:

Path to Professionalization: Finding My Ratio of Publication to Service

This past Friday, Tammy Clewell hosted the second Job Placement Workshop for this school year. The topic for the workshop was how to build a kick ass curriculum vitae.

I have been working on my C.V. since I was an undergraduate at Georgia Tech and I began applying to graduate schools. Like the characters in The Guild, I thought of the C.V. as a record of my achievements and development as a professional scholar. I thought about what I needed to do to get the kind of research-1 position that I wanted after completing my PhD. I knew that I needed publications, which meant that I needed to do more reading, research, and writing. While at Liverpool, I began writing reviews for SFRA Review with this goal in mind. I considered reviewing a kind of intellectual exercise that would yield benefits in the more important refereed publications in journals and books. Also, reviewing would show search committees that I regularly kept up with the field by reading and seeing things that were on the cutting edge.

I also knew that I needed to do some conferencing, so I did a lot of that. I have prepared papers and participated on roundtable discussions at SFRA, ICFA, SLSA, and others. Again, writing essays to present at conferences improves your argumentation and keeps you knee deep in research. These are good things, and I duly noted on my C.V.

Since returning to academia in 2002, even before I had decided on my current career path, I began offering my labor and expertise in service positions. The most important of these landed on my C.V. in the proper place, but it was at the job placement workshop that I began to question how much time I had invested in service roles including those that didn’t make the C.V. cut.

One of the recommendations that I received at the workshop had to do with organizing the service category of my C.V., and in particular, one of the commenters said that I had done a lot of service. Additionally, I was warned against presenting myself as the kind of person who does all of the grunt work. By moving things around, I believe that I can streamline my C.V. in this regard, but this comment made me pause to think about how much work I have done for others at the cost of working on things that I really need to focus on right now: publications and dissertation.

What I come to realize is that there are some really important service things that I do want to pursue: namely, Vice President of the SFRA. I feel that I can do something good for the organization while also giving me the experience of helping run an international academic organization (so, please vote Ellis!).

There are other things that are rewarding, but they take a lot of time away from the writing that I need to focus on as I finish my PhD. I will have to transition out of these commitments in the future, so that I can devote that time to getting another publication sent out and more pages of my dissertation completed.

The lesson to take away from this is to remember to make a ratio of publications, conferencing, and service that fit your goals and personal development. It is okay to say ‘no’ if you don’t have the time to do something, but it is also okay to say ‘yes’ when you have the time to help. Service to others can be a rewarding, enjoyable, and challenging opportunity, but you have to make sure that you take care of yourself before committing to it.