Facebook - beyond your weekend photo's

People use facebook to keep in touch with friends and network with other people in their social circles…But what happens whenever you get recruited by a company for a job?
Many companies these days are looking at Facebook to bring in new employees.

The Central Intelligence Agency has been doing this sine 2006. With a log in required and provides a promotional video to help explain the positions requirements. Ernest and young, a financial company, even tries to recruit potential employees through the social networking program. Sounds too good to be true huh? Well it can be whenever companies judge their wanna-be employee by his page.

Companies have begun to rate their employee’s by the content on their Facebook. According to this internet standard website, 20 percent of companies check these people’s profiles before hiring or rejecting them. Another 24 percent of companies hired their employee based on their social profile, and another 33 percent of companies said they were planning on checking their applicant’s profiles before hiring of rejecting them. Solution, clean up your page…

Since the internet has become so popular and diverse, numerous companies have begun to use it to their advantage to rate potential employee’s. This has forced many people to have made it harder for strangers or non-friends to log in to their page and view their information, lock up their profile so only friends can see their information, cleaning up their social networking profile, or even getting rid of their profile all together. Is it necessary? Since when did we have to look over our shoulder on a site intended for us to share information and memories? Even social groups within Westminster have warned their participants to only have good stuff on their profiles and to positively represent themselves and their groups. Essentially, people need to begin to limiting the people they become friends with, or not do what the sites were intended for…Share memories with people during a time where your supposed to make mistakes and push your boundaries…

While researching for our group project I came across a lot of Content Management Systems, which helps people create web pages and other related content systems. A fellow fraternity brother of mine manages a server through one of these CMS’s. My curiosity got the best of me and I had to look into it more to try and understand it.

CMS, according to Wikipedia, is a computer application used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. Types of content stored on these servers include computer files image media audio and video files, electronic documents and web content. I had to find another site to get a more in-depth understanding of what these CMS’s are and how they function. I found a site dedicated to CMS which had a lot of good information of it. It stated that it allows users to manage content The site broke down a very confusing term into one much simpler definition, “A CMS is a tool that enables a variety of (centralized) technical and (de-centralized) non technical staff to create, edit, manage and finally publish (in a number of formats) a variety of content (such as text, graphics, video, documents etc), whilst being constrained by a centralized set of rules, process and workflows that ensure coherent, validated electronic content.” Essentially, it allows people of all ranges of electronic intelligence to store digital information, ranging from a family member starting and maintaining a family web site, to our campuses Novell portal and our classes page out site.

Some examples of popular CMS sites are Joomla, Drupal and PHP-Nuke. All three have detailed information about what they offer and are good examples for the numerous CMS types offered electronically. These are all great examples of how far we have come electronically. Within ten years, I went from waiting hours to not hear a busy signal, to being able to store and readily refer to content of my choosing. Though today this may not be an interest of mine, it’s good to know that one day this option may help my life.

The virtual classroom

In today’s world we have the luxury of learning in our pajamas on our couch. Classrooms have gone from a desk and a notebook to a website. Though convenient, does it really get the job done?

All students learn in different ways. Some learn quicker and easier through hearing it and writing it down. Others prefer to read and reflect on the material intended to educate. I know personally I am a better visual learner. On line classes do not always support the education system and there have been numerous tests conducted to show how students prefer to learn.

The University of Penn State has a lot of information on the matter. They boil learning types into four main ones represented by the acronym VARK. The types are Visual, such as seeing charts and graphs, Auditory, lectures, group discussions and teacher student verbal interaction, Read/write, reading and text-based, and Kinesthetic, relating material to experiences and examples. The site went on to give three examples of tests conducted to help find how people prefer to learn. In all three, the majority of subjects preferred visual and kinesthetic types as opposed to plain text. Not only did the subjects prefer the methods but the results showed that the methods were more effective in the learning process.

I am a visual/kinesthetic learner, plain reading and writing does not help me retain material. On line classrooms are a mainly text based discussion with little to no interaction with the instructor. The instructor is the most vital part of education, and with them mostly omitted from the process I couldn’t imagine how much would be retained by the student. This would prove that though convenient and easy, on line classrooms are not always the best method of learning.