Meg Stewart at Vassar posted the abstract of the talk she, Mary Ann Cunningham, and Kirsten Menking gave on April 20, 2007, in San Francisco at the American Association of Geographers meeting on using virtual globes in higher education. This is based in part on the many presentations that Meg and I gave together over the last year to faculty, students, and staff. The official conference proceedings abstract is here. They were kind enough to include me as a co-author of the talk.
It is Pi’s birthday today. I thought about making him a pie of some kind. Instead, I will just post his page. (Link opens in a new window!)
For some additional π day fun, download piX for Mac OSX. I calculated it out to one million decimals, which took 447.190 seconds. When I tried to post it, my database choked. So below is π to much less than one million decimals. Enjoy!
The interview is a standard part of securing employment in the modern job market. Whether you are seeking a job in higher ed or as a day laborer (and I use these examples only because I have experience in both), you will need to interview, and interview strongly, to get the job. You will spend more time with new co-workers than your friends and family. Now, whether you really want to work with these folks is a different story, improtant or you to find out on the interview. Below are key points I keep in mind when interviewing. The goal is to get the job offer. All decisions follow from that.
Why am I writing this? I have conducted nearly 100 interviews in the last four years with college students seeking on-campus student employment and engaged in a dozen interviews myself in the last ten years. I am not a job counselor and have no qualifications other than the aforementioned experiences.
Interviewing is basically a timed oral essay. The nice thing is that you can prepare for it. You are intimately familiar with the subject matter: you, and are better qualified to speak to your strengths, skills, knowledge, and goals than any other living thing. Identify your goals. Know what you want. Understand that you are marketing yourself. Keep your marketing message in mind.
We all learn how to write essays in high school. Here are the three steps to creating your interview essay:
Have a thesis. Your thesis is, “I am the best person for this job”.
Support your thesis. A week before you start interviewing, write down the three strongest reasons that you are the best person for the job. Use positive examples of contributions you would make.
Present a strong conclusion. Just like that high school essay, a concluding sentence or two that summarizes your thesis and supporting points is crucial. These should be the last words out of your mouth, and it should end with something along the lines of, “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to interview with you.”
Other key things to remember are:
Take notes. My mind races during an interview. I will often say things that I want to emphasize again later on, or think of something unrelated to the interview that I absolutely need to follow up on. By jotting it down, you appear to be ready for the professional world, and you can address the topic later.
Neatness counts. Clip your fingernails, tie your shoelaces, etc.
Dress for the job you ultimately want. Interviewing to clean stables but want to be a jockey? Dress like a jockey. Interviewing to work in the mail room but want to be the CEO? Dress like a CEO.
Interviewing is like sex, voting, and retiring. Do it early and do it often. Very few people care about your motives. You don’t have to accept every job offer, but do accept every interview offer. (I do not suggest that you accept every offer of sex! Use discretion. Protect yourself. Do accept every offer to vote or retire.)
Practice, practice, practice. Try out new approaches in interviews you don’t need. Have a great joke about nervous interviewees? Don’t try it when up for your dream job! Do unleash it when interviewing for the burger-flipping position.
Be nervous. Its okay, really, to be nervous. If you can channel that nervousness into positive energy, do it. Remember to breathe evenly, and visualize something that makes you happy, whether its a coral reef or an image of the first pay-check.
Other good hits on this topic: “A glimpse and a hook“. This fellow has some good advice. I disagree with his thoughts on cover letters. Even if no one ever reads your cover letter, writing a clear, concise cover letter is one of the best ways to prepare for an interview. Write it, rewrite it. I suggest that you should spend twice as much time on your cover letter as you CV. Questions to ask yourself during the process are:
How well does my CV reflect what I am saying in my cover letter?
Can I excise verbage from the cover letter. (Translation: Write a draft, take a red pen and cross out any and all extra words!)
Keep it brief. In “A glimpse and a hook”, the writer emphasizes that his opinions are formed within 30 seconds. I don’t want to read the gory details. I want those later.
Provide just enough detail to allow me to formulate good questions. A cover letter is a balancing act. When I interview, I need something to get the conversation going. If your cover letter and CV answer every question, I might not even bring you in for an interview!
Conform to standards. Read and internalize Strunk & White. (This is advice I should follow.)
In a future post, I will discuss being the interviewer, and the techniques that I have found effective for identifying candidates I would be happy to work with and who would contribute substantially to core mission.
One of the coolest things these folks are doing is soliciting content and remixes from the community of viewers. Have a camera and computer? Film your thoughts on the subject and post them GooTube (that is, Google Video or YouTube) with the tag “net neutrality”. Or download the video for Final Cut Pro and create your own mix.
I admit that I am coming late to the wiki party. Sure, I have played with a lot of them: MediaWiki, ZWiki, TWiki, Wicked, yadda yadda. I would play, then go back to the bloggingtools for online writing, or Plone for anything more than just writing. I saw the power and flexibility of this corner of the read/write web, but I was unable to reconcile the anarchic qualities of Wiki-ness with the (relatively) modest needs of pedagogy and scholarship.
Last weekend, the crank pulley on my car fell off on a rural road in the cell-phone-service-free region of the southern Catskills late on a bitter-cold night. (Heroes) Jay, Jed, and Renee helped me out of a difficult and potentially dangerous situation. As I waited for the parts and repairs, I played around with GTDTiddlyWiki, a single-file javascript/xhtml/css non-linear hypertext authoring wiki system that incorporates David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” principles into TiddlyWiki. I organized my work projects, my home projects, and started to use it to store thoughts for this blog. Like Gmail before it, GTDTW has changed my relationship with the web browser.
Yesterday, I spent a little bit of time gathering the disparate chunks of information I have found useful in my (relatively) new job at Columbia. The motivation was, again, getting stuck in the mountains. I had limited landline service, a mobile phone with dying batteries, and a laptop. I was able to call out and let folks at CCNMTL know that I wasn’t going to be in, but I desperately wanted needed the contact information for everyone I could possibly need to reach out and touch.
Using the web-data on the CCNMTL site, I wrote the contact list up as a TiddlyWiki document, linked the email addresses, and formatted it so it is easier for me to read. Between Firefox’s “Find” and TiddlyWiki’s built-in search, I can find numbers as quickly as if I were using high-end CRM software.
I then grabbed the most difficult document to retrieve from Columbia’s web site: the Inter Campus Shuttle Bus Schedule. Trust me, it can take five minutes to find it, by which time you have missed your bus. I threw that data into a TiddlyWiki table. No more scrambling to find the data.
Another great feature talked about elsewhere is the embedded print stylesheet. One of my first tasks today will be to print out the contact list and the shuttle schedule at the smallest legible size to keep in my wallet for emergencies. GTDTiddlyWiki’s print stylesheet uses open bullets for lists, a useful feature for those who like to check off done items. Further information on the uses of GTDTiddlyWiki can be found here and here.
So now, how does this really impact me. My commute (a favorite topic here) takes advantage of a number of tools. Vienna, a great FLOSS RSS aggregator keeps me up to date on news, blogs, and mailing lists. Democracy gives me TV and video. SBAGEN, another FLOSS application, is a binaural beat generator that I leave running while I do other things. Mmmm, open chakras. GTDTiddlyWiki and TiddlyWiki linked together are my writing and organizing tools.
Dropping the WikiBar javascript into the TiddlyWiki html file enables some basic wysiwyg editing. I was able to drop that code into TiddlyWiki, but not GTDTiddlyWiki.
But what about the pedagogical value? If I were still supporting students and faculty in the humanities, I would suggest that it could be a great note taking tool on a memory stick. I got into technology through hypertext fiction written in Storyspace. I know folks are using TiddlyWiki to write hypertext fiction, and MediaWiki to write massively-multi-author HTF. What about patient charts? These could then be encrypted to preserve confidentiality. How about learning objects? Oh, and the low-hanging fruit, how this post started as an email to a former colleague: you could author your entire site in a read/write single-file wiki and post it readonly to the web. There has to be some value in that for higher education. Gone would be the days of a six month wait to have your content updated.
Chime in, please. I am trying to sort through these ideas.
Puppy Pi’s first birthday is March 14. My parents, going above and beyond, ordered a Grand Carpet Mill, which they brought up on Saturday morning. As I assembled it, Pi kept walking all over the parts and standing on the running surface. He explored every aspect of the device, henceforth known as the “puppy-torture9000″, and was curious to see what happened next. His favorite parts were, of course, the box in which the thing was shipped. It wasn’t hard to assemble, but conversation, pup, and events conspired to make the total assembly time about one hour. Before we went for lunch, I placed him on it and held his collar while he ran for a little. After lunch, I took this video with the work MacBook Pro:
Please don’t call the ASPCA on me. He really seems to enjoy it.
I read about Twitter on one of the feeds I read using Vienna the other day. I thought, “Neat, but I don’t really see a use for it personally, much less pedagogically.” I may have even said that out loud. I clicked through and looked over the site. And I moved on to another tab. I had also seen something on D’Arcy Norman’s site about Yahoo! Pipes, and Jay (any day now) had talked about Pipes earlier in the week. Another tool I clicked through to, played for a few minutes, and left open in a tab. Read the rest of this entry »
A pretty sweet tool, Democracy Player is an application mashup of perenial favs VLC and BitTorrent, plus a lightweight web browser (gecko?) for finding potential broad/vod/pod/vlog casts. In theory, this tool lowers the bar for content producers to distribute their video. You post video content to the Democracy Player and anyone who downloads it from you immediately starts seeding it out to any other interested viewers. The more people download, the faster your content gets distributed to new viewers. Read the rest of this entry »
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