Posts Tagged job

Started working for Sun, developing a collaborative learning environment

June 23, 2008 at 10:17 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

Last week marked the start of my work for Sun Microsystems.  I’m being dubbed an “instructional designer” and I’m charged with researching social learning and virtual environments.  At the moment we are working on a couple initiatives, one which includes facilitating knowledge allocation and sharing among Sun employees.  I imagine an environment similar to Netvibes or iGoogle, where the user can freely drag-and-drop and add content as they please.  It may even be worth modeling the UI after the UIs of either of these services since they seem to be so popular and user-friendly (I love my Netvibes homepage… makes my life on the Web much more convenient).  I think it will be important for the environment to be as non-restrictive as possible.  Not only does this include being able to freely arrange content, as you please, but also having the ability to freely import feeds from elsewhere, such as BBC, CNN, or your favorite blog.  Not sure if the latter will cause security issues.  In addition, having the ability to change the design of your CLE (collaborative learning environment) with regard to your favorite color, etc. would be a bonus to make it feel more uniquely “yours.”

Does anyone who uses iGoogle, Netvibes, or a similar service notice anything about those environments that they would like to see improved?  I don’t use Netvibes’ bookmarking and rating functions often, but I think such tools would be useful in a CLE for Sun employees.  I think the reason I don’t use them on Netvibes is cuz I don’t feel a sense of community on Netvibes yet… I know they’ve tried to improve this, but I don’t think it’s quite there.  For Sun, however, the sense of community may be greater since it will be a walled garden of sorts, more of a bounded community.

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Rapid changes: moving, goodbyes, and job decisions

May 28, 2008 at 10:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

Haven’t blogged for a while.  Things have been moving incredibly fast since graduation.  On top of moving all my stuff from my apartment in Manhattan to my Dad’s house in Overland Park, I had to say my last goodbyes (one of which was my g/f who I won’t see for possibly 2 years – wasn’t easy), work on a project for one of my professors (we are creating a video tribute to the late anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis which will be screened at Oxford in June and hopefully the AAA meeting in San Francisco in November), and juggle multiple internship/job offers.  I won’t go into too much detail about every offer I received, but I will say I ultimately landed an internship with Sun Microsystems.  I’m not completely sure what I will be doing aside from researching how to leverage internet media for educational purposes as well as working with Second Life, so look forward to me blogging a lot about such things.  I’m very excited to get started, as I can work remotely and set my own hours (could be dangerous, I work all the time).  Since I can work from home I decided not to stay in Kansas City but to get out of pocket and head to San Diego with my brother.  He just got a place in Oceanside a few blocks from the beach (he got a new job as well).  This Thursday I fly to Denver, where he lives now, then Friday through Sunday we are going to drive to Moab, Vegas, and finally San Diego.  Should be a nice little road trip.  If anyone knows of some cool places to see along the way, I’d be delighted to hear about them.  I will make sure to take some pictures and post them later.  Anyways, that’s it for now.  Life is a little up in the air at the moment.  Will get back to blogging regularly when everything settles down and my feet are on the ground again.

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Cultural capital, resumes, and social interaction

April 25, 2008 at 2:41 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

I’ve spent most of today hashing out a resume for a potential job offer. From a list of achievements and relevant experience I made a while back, I constructed a one page textual representation of all the recognized cultural capital I’ve acquired over the years. Resumes have always been funny to me; why can’t you just give an interested employer a list of relevant experiences, activities, etc. and call it good? Why must there be such a science to creating a resume. I mean, I spent 30 minutes today talking to a campus employee whose sole job is to critique and give advice on constructing resumes and an hour or so more making sure my resume was juuuuust right. Do employers really care if your margins are off, if you write in complete sentences, or if you don’t use action verbs? Has anyone ever been given justification on why this is so? In addition to getting advice on my resume, I was also given an interview guide. I skimmed through it while walking home from campus figuring I might learn a thing or two. I was astonished by how precise the guide was with regard to behavior during an interview. It read as if it were some esoteric text revealing the all-powerful secrets of influencing employers in order to get the job you want. But aren’t the “secrets” known by everyone, thus rendering them no longer secrets? I read somewhere a while back, maybe in a Goffman text, that when you recognize and subsequently verbalize the structure of social interaction, it breaks down. What I took this to mean was that social interaction hides behind a degree of intuition and its best to keep it that way lest you botch the whole thing. It’s difficult, however, when you study anthropology as I do (or sociology) and your “job” is to analyze and pick apart these things; it can lead to some awkward social encounters! Eventually you learn (or at least I did) to keep your opinions inside in order to preserve the interaction. You turn yourself over to intuition and “feel” rather than “think” things out. Is this what we do in interviews and other strict social interactions? Do we all recognize the structure but choose to temporarily ignore it in order to preserve the interaction? I have an interview next Thursday… wish me luck on not over-analyzing the situation! ;-)

Just some Thursday evening thoughts….

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