A Lightning Fast Introduction to Digital Self Defense

A Lightning Fast Introduction to Digital Self Defense

Each year at the Rochester Institute of Technology we introduce the concepts of Digital Self Defense to incoming students. We’ve tried a variety of presentation types and venues, ranging from several sets of co-presenters talking with “smaller” groups of students to one presenter in front of the 2000+ students at our Gordon Field House.

We kicked off our activities this year at New Student Move-in Day with our table of resource materials and a guest appearance by Phishy. Phishy provides a visual reminder for students to watch out for phishing attempts. Quite a few students posed with Phishy for photos.

Our New Student Orientation activities will conclude on Saturday, Sept 1, as we deliver a series of Lightning Talks on the subject of Digital Self Defense. We’ll cover online reputation management, safer social networking, avoiding online identity theft, security requirements at RIT, and illegal file sharing.

Because we’ll have captionists and ASL (American Sign Language)  interpreters, we’ve added 3 seconds to each slide. As in other Lightning Talks, the slides will advance automatically, every 18 seconds. I’m the only one of the presenters who’s done a Lightning Talk, and I’m looking forward to seeing how each presenter deals with the challenge of a very large (~2500) audience and a slide deck they don’t control.

Five presenters. Five different styles. Huge audience. Should be interesting.

Watch for my followup post!