Season 3 Episode 8: Digital Presence with Teresa Chan

In this podcast Vic speaks with Teresa Chan about ‘digital presence’ - our online personas – and about the opportunities to disseminate our scholarship via online platforms. We recorded the conversation live at the 2022 Harvard Macy program - Transforming your Teaching using Technology. In a metacognitive move, we hoped our podcast conversation would illustrate some of the points we made in the conversation – “the medium is the message”!

We started with Teresa’s website, and reflected on the choices she made in establishing this as her online ‘homebase,’ referencing Michael Hyatt’s conceptual framework and book Platform. We talked about the process of curating such as website as a digital portfolio, and the practicalities, such as hosting on Wix or Squarespace. Teresa talked about how she got interested in online presence and the encouragement of mentors like Jonathan Sherbino from KeyLime podcast.

Our conversation turned to Teresa’s article Social Media and the 21st Century scholar (one of the pre-readings for the Transforming your Teaching using Technology course). In this piece, Teresa and her co-authors offer 2 personal case studies of how to use social media for education, scholarship and health advocacy. In our further conversation Teresa talked about the ‘moral imperative of getting great science out there,’ and we walked through an example of how she might disseminate the messages in an article accepted for publication. Twitter features heavily in Teresa’s dissemination strategies, but we also considered the opportunities of other platforms - Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.

We finished with a deeper dive on podcasting, including Teresa’s own MacPFD Spark podcast, and our Harvard Macy Institute podcast. Our ‘live audience’ on Zoom joined the conversation with questions from the chat, and we talked about podcast length, audio recording, and how to listen…

Thanks to the faculty team and scholars who joined our conversation, and to Teresa Chan for sharing her wealth of experience.