New Ways of Job Searching

As a student getting ready to start job hunting in a few month, I was very excited to read articles for this week about job hunting using social media. I was not sure about the whole idea of using social networking sites for my job hunting because I only used facebook, blogs and twitter for my leisure, thankful to this class I became more open minded about the social networking and business.

"The Blog is the New Resume" was very inspiring as it talked about how people are now able to present themselves without any control (good, or bad?) to the recruiters. You can post about your education, past experience etc.. in the way that no original paper resume could have presented about you. "Social networking has its perks" talked about use of Profiles (such as Facebook and LinkedIn) and Twitter in job hunting. It is important to have a consistent character in all of those accounts, and people should present more about their business skills then personal stuff.

I was very excited to see these ideas, but it left me with one big question. I felt like job hunting using social media may not work in trying to get a job at larger companies. The question is whether the recruiter will have time to go through all that we posted online about ourselves. A blog, facebook profile, LinkedIn profile, twitter, is a lot to look through. Once my internship boss told me they have about 15,000 applicants every year for about 30 positions available, and they don't even have time to look through everyone's paper cover letter carefully enough. It's an extreme case, but I think that this method does not work for larger companies like this, who gets very large number of applicants. Through more research and this week's class, I hope I could find answer to the question or know more about job hunting using social media in larger companies.

Make sure it HAS to be online

As Web 2.0 became common in everyday life, online collaboration had started being used in many different places.

Kristin Alloway's article talks about how it's becoming more common to use online collaboration in the field of education. From using "online classroom" that has video calls and chats to publishing blogs or articles of their own, student have utilized many Web 2.0 technologies in their education. There are many benefits in using such tools of online collaboration, including distance learning, give students motivation and giving reluctant students opportunity to speak up in online conversations. However, there are always risks for young children using internet such as security issues, non-reliable articles, inappropriate contents and simply the destruction by many other things online. After reading the whole article, I was not sure if the benefit of putting children online is more than the risk associated with it.

Although I believe that online collaboration means so much for education today, I don't think it is appropriate to use online tools for what we could do off-line. Collaboration is everywhere in education, and online collaboration made it easier to collaborate with people who were not reachable before. I think it is questionable to conduct online collaboration if collaboration could happen in the real classroom without putting it online. One example in the article talked about how classroom conversation continues online as homework at night, but I think it is such a nonsense.

It is in a completely different field, but info Zine's article talked about the greatest example in this case. It talks about the use of online collaboration for open government and transparency. In this, online collaboration brought "new" collaboration that was not achievable before instead of putting existing collaboration online. I'd like to see more of these collaborations in the future.

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Culture Changes over Technology?

Michael Sampson put an interesting article about Virtual Work Environment and culture changes. He argues that despite many critics saying working in a virtual environment will require a cultural change in the company, it is not true.

I can imagine why Andy Adkins and other critics say that working in a virtual environment takes cultural change within the company. Working in a virtual world seems a lot different than what people are used to. However, I think that things like this is talked about whenever new technology comes up. I'm pretty sure people were afraid of changes in the work places when technology like internet and email came up for the first time.

I think it is important that developers of these technology understand these thoughts of users. Instead of focusing on technology only, they should think more about user interface and make it easier for users to start using these technology like virtual work environment.