Media Activities
Voice Quality. Recording your voice gives you a chance to learn how your voice sounds to others and provides an opportunity for you to improve its effectiveness. Don’t be surprised if you fail to recognize your own voice.
Your task: Record yourself reading a newspaper or magazine article.
a. If you think your voice sounds a bit high, practice speaking slightly lower.
b. If your voice is low or expressionless, practice speaking slightly louder and with more inflection.
c. Ask a colleague, teacher, or friend to provide feedback on your pronunciation, pitch, volume, rate, and professional tone.
Write a brief summary of your observation and post to appropriate discussion board.
YouTube: Critiquing a Satirical Clip Lampooning PowerPoint
Your task: Watch Don McMillan’s now famous YouTube video “Life After Death by PowerPoint 2010”. Which specific PowerPoint ills is McMillan satirizing? Which bad habits do the video parody that corresponds with design principles introduced in this chapter? Write a brief summary of the short clip and post to appropriate discussion board.
Using Social Media in the Job Search. One of the fastest-growing trends in employment is using social media sites during the job search.
Your task: Locate one social media site and set up an account. Explore the site to discover how job seeks can use it to search for a job and how employers can use it to find job candidates. Write a brief summary of your findings and post to appropriate discussion board.
Digging
for Digital Dirt. Keeping a Low
Profile Online. Before embarking on your job hunt, you may want to know
what employers might find if they searched your personal life in cyber-space,
specifically FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, and so forth. Running your name
through Google and other search engines, particularly enclosed in quotation
marks to lower the number of hits, is usually the first step. Assembling a
digital portrait of an applicant is easier than ever thanks to new spy-worthy
Web sites such as Snitch.name (http://snitch.name)
that college information from a number of search engines, Web sites, and social
networks. Self-titled “The Social White Pages,” Snitch.name not only looks for
people’s profiles in social networks, but also compiles publicly available data
found on services such as 123people.com, PeekYou.com, and so forth.
Your
task: Use Google, Snitch.name, Bing, or Dogpile to search the Web for your
full name, enclosed in quotation marks. In Google, don’t forget to run an image
search at http://www.google.com/images
to find any photos of questionable taste. Write a brief summary on your general
observations and results.
Role-Playing in an Interview Simulation. One of the best ways to understand
interview dynamics and to develop confidence is to role-play the interview
process.
Your
task: Complete the interview simulation below. Upon completion, take a
screenshot and post the results in the appropriate assignment link.
