Job hunting 2.0

An online video guest lecture at Katholieke Hogeschool Mechelen in Belgium.

I had the pleasure to give a lecture yesterday to students taking PR courses at HKM in Mechelen focusing on how students could use web 2.0 in their job hunt. The aim was to offer students tips that they could use when looking for a job and applying for one as well as invite them to have a more critical and niche approach of using web 2.0 applications.

When I first got in contact with the school we agreed to do the video guest lecture since Geert Van den Eijnden, the lecturer hosting the course, showed great interest in “playing” with new media and since at that time I was not aware of my schedule for this month.

However with my coming to Belgium and therefore travel to Mechelen it was tempting to abandon the online idea and opt for the traditional in class delivery. The solution we found offered a balance of both a big surprise for the attending students.

Geert joined his class as usual. We connected using TokBox, which we have tested before, and tried to solve some of the technical glitches on the go. They had to do with school IT protection for downloading new software or cables too short for the laptop to allow it to be turned towards the classroom so that I can see them as much as they saw me. Apart from that everything went well and the bandwidth was broad enough so that I could even embed and play a video from YouTube during the talk. I used Michael Cera’s video resume, a parody of Aleksey Vayner’s infamous “Impossible is Nothing” no longer available online, to show albeit in a funny way how a video resume should not be.

The interaction with the students was good. Some of them, having quickly figured out how to find me, started sending me messages on Twitter. Others sent me LinkedIn requests. They were engaged, well informed and answered my questions in a manner that showed a critical and strategic approach to job hunting. Their questions too were interesting and reflected concern for how their use of new media could impact their work. They were also interested in my personal story, which I was glad to share.

After an hour of online lecture, I joined them in the class. Judging from the amazement of more than half of the students present, they weren’t expecting me to be so close.

Bruno Neuville, the KHM’s Communication Management Director of Studies, also attended the class. He qualified the lecture as both interesting and innovating. I felt honored to have him had in the classroom.

But I was not the only one to have given a lecture at KHM. In fact Geert invites throughout the year a series of speakers, local and international specialists from public relations, media, social media or journalism in attempt to provide students with as much business insight and contacts.

As usual, my presentation is embedded below:

Social Research Tools

I had the honor to be invited to deliver another lecture at to the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication of The University of Kansas. Many thanks to Dr Mugur Geana for inviting me.

This time however was to address a group of master’s students enrolled in a research methods class. My task was to show some applications and tools freely available online that could be potentially used in an academic research setting. I concentrated on Google, Twitter and Facebook. After giving a short review of each tool or application, I gave an example from my own experience of using them for academic research purposes and highlighted the advantages and disadvantages of using them.

I think it is highly important that current students, especially those in communication schools, are at least made aware of these platforms. I also believe that they should be encouraged to experiment with social media. While academic journals might maintain their reluctancy to publish papers using experimental and exploratory tools and methods, students should nonetheless aim to familiarize themselves with them as a way to preparing themselves for their future careers. Furthermore, with pressures on both academia and professional environments to become more profitable or reduce spending, being aware of the tools and applications that can enhance work, increase efficiency or provide data in a quick and easy manner people aware of these free options could be in a position of advantage. Finally, research and academia alike are, in my opinion, about exploration and experimentation so if they are not going to use these tool, who will?

The lecture took place online and was delivered via Skype. Unfortunately TokBox didn’t perform as expected so students were given handouts of my presentation to consult and make notes on while my powerpoint and I were being projected on a bigger screen.

The presentation is below:

 

Live Video Guest Lecture – Florida Southern College

I had a video guest lecture to Florida Southern College, to the class of Dr Chris Fenner. I talked about the Olympic Movement and new media from a historical perspective. Questions about the impact of emerging technologies on society in general and the Olympic experience in particular were asked.

Unlike my previous guest lectures, given to the University of Missouri-Columbia or the University of Kansas, that were done via Skype, we used a browser-based solution: TokBox. Some technical difficulties made things more challenging but the sound and video quality when the internet connection functioned at full speed were very good. The platform also enabled embedding a Slideshare presentation reducing thus the hassle of figuring out how to present additional material while keeping the video on screen.

The presentation is below:

I believe the class was a novelty for the students as well as for the college as a whole. Students engaged with me both by answering and asking questions and they seemed to genuinely enjoy the lecture. This shows that there is some great potential in integrating live video into traditional in-class, on-campus lectures.

Many thanks to Chris Fenner and James Lynch for making this possible.

New Media Katho course – June09 evaluations

During the first week of June I was in Belgium again delivering for the second time my own course on new media. I had 14 Erasmus students from all over Europe, a dynamic, lively and very interested class that I have enjoyed teaching. It was a marathon class with 4 hours of teaching daily, tight deadlines, team projects, a company visit, small research tasks, and other academic assignments. It was also a class of novelties, the first time when I had a guest, Dr Mugur Geana, Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at the University of Kansas, joining us live all the way from the USA. 

Similar with the last semester, all students were asked to take a short online survey evaluating the course, the content, my delivery, the materials and technologies used, the relevancy of the course to their future careers and giving their suggestions for further improvements. 

What makes me especially happy is that the evaluations this semester are better than the previous ones. I am also glad to see that students liked the hands-on approach to the class and found it useful and challenging.

Here’s the overall evaluation for the course:

You can see the complete evaluation file here:

guest lecture @ Imperial College, London

On Monday, March 23, I gave a lecture on using web 2.0 to promote creativity and creative work in social media and professional environments. The attendees of the lecture were students from the Missouri School of Journalism of the University of Missouri-Columbia in the USA, now in London for a semester doing internships related to their undergraduate majors. All the thanks to Byron T. Scott, Professor Emeritus of Journalism at the University of Missouri – Columbia, who made this all possible. 

It was an evening meeting that took place in one of the rooms of the Imperial College in London after the students had finished their busy and challenging working days. I was impressed to find out about the prestigious companies they were interning with and the daily activities on their agendas. Similarly, I was impressed by how interested the students were in new media and their desire to experiment with it much higher than the one of the European students (from the UK or Belgium) that I have lectured to before. While most of the students seems to use social networks because most of their friends do there is little awareness of privacy policies and how these can be changed so that personal information can be kept separate from professional one. Similarly, most of the students  have heard of many of the platforms available online (from blogging, to social media, live streaming – be it audio or radio) but their knowledge stopped there. Also, many of them had the skills and talent to produce high-quality content for these platforms but proved to be quite reluctant to experiment with them the fear that their creative work will wrongly appropriated by somebody else being higher than the desire of making themselves and their talent known.

While having a master’s degree in social networking such as the recently launched by the Birmingham City University might not necessary, students now enrolled in media schools (focusing on arts, journalism, communication…) should however be exposed more to social media as well as be encouraged to explore this realm rather than taking it for granted.