Last week was the second annual Social Media Week, gathering people in nine major cities around the world to join a burgeoning conversation about the emerging trends in online and mobile technologies. It's been an entire year since I was first slowly dipping my toes in this exciting and fast paced world! I remember attending a few events last year to broaden my mind on what social media was all about and to connect with the vibrant tech-savvy community in Toronto.

It's been quite the ride since then and this year I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to actually host an event with Journalists for Human Rights. Of course, I stuck to my passion and what I know best and put together a talk about using social media to spread human rights awareness with my friend and education superstar Carissa MacLennan. We tried to keep our session as intimate, interactive, and hands-on as we could to really drive home our point that though social media is an incredibly powerful tool, there is no law that says it will inevitably produce good. When dealing with something as crucial as human rights, we have a responsibility to use social media in a critical, purposeful, and effective way and our Rights Media framework is a conceptual toolkit that is meant to do just that.

Below is a condensed version of our presentation (minus the many media analysis activities our attendees so brilliantly deconstructed!) to give you a sense of how exactly you can achieve this.

On behalf of jhr, a huge thank you to the SMWTO organizing team and the staff at St. Andrew's Club and Conference Centre for making the whole planning process of this event an absolute breeze on my part! You're all rockstars in my books. And of course, thanks to those who came out and engaged in this very important conversation...hope you'll keep the dialogue going!

Until next year ; )

Workshopping it out.Starting our talk. Photo from @amirad