An Ending and a Beginning

Wow it is hard to believe that this semester is over already! It seems like only yesterday that we all walked into ALES 204 for the first time. I came into this class highly skeptical of what I would learn in a class that appears to focus on tweeting and blogging, but I was able to learn and refine my abilities in many communication techniques. Before this class, I only really used Facebook for social media, but through this class I have become more aware of the wide variety of social media from the more professional, such as LinkedIn, to the more informal, such as Pinterest. The main thing I learned is that no matter what form of social media you use you need to use it critically and with discernment, rather than as a place to dump your random thought fragments.

Although I learned a lot in this class I am still struggling with seeing realistic applications for this new-found knowledge. I find that even though I am only following 24 tweeters, the amount of information that appears on my Twitter feed is overwhelming and I still find it difficult to sort the truly important information from the masses of irrelevant Tweets. I also find it difficult to believe that social media is an effective way of connecting with future employers in the agriculture industry, as my family has worked in agriculture for as long as I can remember and none of them have heard of LinkedIn, Facebook pages, or podcasting (I did find one really good podcast: Call of the Land, that has a lot of good agriculture information relevant to Alberta) . I still earnestly believe in the incredible power of face to face communication for networking purposes. Honestly, if I was an employer and I had the choice between someone who has volunteered for my company and I have had the opportunity to talk with about future goals and interests, versus someone who posted a resume on the internet, I would pick the first. Obviously that level of connection to a company is not always possible, such as if you are applying for a position in a different province, so in that case social media could have some use. However, I believe social media should be considered a supplement rather than primary resource.

Left image courtesy of John Haslam. Right image courtesy of Kate Hiscock. Images combined by Lynda Forsyth.

That being said, I learned many important skills in this class for non-social-media related pursuits, such as: interview skills, professional email etiquette, and presentation skills. I believe that these skills are imporant for all people as I know they will be used continually throughout the course of my life. In a way I wish that this course focused more on these communication fundamentals that will not change considerably over time, rather than on the social media whims that are changing every day.A fellow student, Alyssa, commented in her blog that because technology is always changing it is important to learn how to use these new technologies effectively and understand the limitations they have. However, I think that, because social media is always changing the information we are learning today could be obsolete in a year, so I think it is most important to focus on more stable forms of communication in a course like this. We are not going to come back in five years to take this class again in order to get a social media update, it is our responsibility as educated individuals to navigate this changing internet world on our own, and have courses like this to teach us skills to be effective navigators.  

Although this course is done now, I know this is just the beginning for all of us in determining what types of communication we find work best for us and having opportunities to apply the knowledge we have aquired in this course.
Over the course of the semester I have commented on the blogs of: Meaghan, Bianca, Shannon, Alyssa, and Hannah.

We Live in a Wiki World

So after my reading week vacation it was time to hit the books again, and continue my social media exploration journey. This time around I have decided to explore the ever-changing world of Wikipedia. In case you don't know, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that can be editted and changed by the general populace and is therefore often considered to be an unreliable source of information for research. As unreliable as some people make it sound, I honestly use it as a starting point for many of my assignments and papers and, somewhat surprisingly, I have an immunology professor that uses Wikipedia to support many of his lectures.

Since the dawn of this famous method of disseminating information it has been well-publicized that anyone can edit anything on the website, but not as widely publicized is HOW you actually do this editting. Honestly, when I first approached the task, I was overwhelmed by the specific coding you have to use to make a single sentence look just the way you want it to. I don't know very much about computers or HTML, and before this task I was a simple "click the italics button in a Word document" type of computer user, but now I would say I am a WikiHTML pro. It is actually quite simple. There are only a few different coding phrases that you actually need to use such as <ref> for references and ==for a section header==. I still had to preview the wikipedia page after almost every sentence to ensure that it looked the way I wanted it to, but at the end I was proud of my work and felt like I could edit more Wikipedia pages in the future if I needed to.

Screencapture of the Wkipedia page I editted on the Cacomistle (image retrieved on March 23,2012 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacomistle)

The particular Wikipedia page I worked on was for the Cacomistle, a type of ring-tailed cat found in Central America. Before this assignment all I knew about the Cacomistle is that it is a strange animal that a lot of people don't even know exists. It was really interesting looking up studies, and information on this elusive species and compiling it together into one document that people can use in the future as a resource. I added a brief overview on the Classification, Physical Description, Habitat and Range, Nutrition, and Reproduction in order to give readers a basic overview of the species. The intimidating thing is knowing that a lot of people will take the information I posted as total infallable fact, which I hope is true, but in reality because this species is so mysterious each source had slightly different numbers and descriptions.When creating my Wiki I tried to include primarily the facts that appeared to be universal across all my sources and avoided the ideas that were variable. Hopefully, if the information I posted turns out to be incorrect, another Wikipedia editor will come across it and fix any errors I made. In that way Wikipedia is excellent; it is unofficially being "peer-reviewed" by other users to double check facts and sources. Though at any one moment the information may not be 100% reliable, the overall quality of the information is excellent because it is always being checked and rechecked.

On of my classmates Lauren Bradshaw commented in her blog, "What better way to build passion about a subject than bringing together a group of people who share a common interest?". I think this is great way to look at using a Wiki. A group of people, who otherwise would not likely have met, have the opportunity to share ideas and delve deeper into common areas of interest. As well, since passion is often considered to be a contagious emotion, seeing the passion a group of people have for a particular topic could engage a unsuspecting bystander allowing the excitement to extend past the boundaries of the internet.

Social Media: On Vacation

Last week was reading week and I was lucky enough to spend it in BC visiting some of my friends at other universities. During my week of relaxation and travel I had the opportunity to explore social media usage in a more recreational, interest-based way. I have been so focused on the use of social media for self-marketing and academic uses in this class that I almost forgot about using social media to develop interests and discover new and exciting places and opportunities.The two websites I am going to focus on are Stumbleupon and Pinterest, though there are hundreds of these types of sites popping up daily.

I first heard about Stumbleupon from my friends over Facebook commenting that it is hard to focus on homework when there is so much "stumbling to be done". Obviously I was intrigued enough to sign up for an account. Though at first I found myself looking solely at funny photos and videos, through further investigation I discovered that you could list topics such as agriculture, science, and ecology. Through "stumbling" through interests such as these you can get a quick visual glimpse of current issues and discoveries in those fields. In some ways this is really similar to Twitter, as you can quickly access all types of industry information, but personally, as a visual learner, I find the highly textual nature of Twitter difficult to follow. I also found that sometimes through the random collection of articles and photos I have discovered organizations and causes that really mean a lot to me. For example I am very interested in third world agricultural development and I would love to spend some time overseas improving food security and management and through Stumbleupon I discovered the organization Mercy Corps which works with many facets of third world development including agriculture and food security. They also have many international internships that I may apply for in the future. I had never heard of this program before I "stumbled" upon it a few weeks ago and it may become a very integral part of my life in the future.

Figure 1: Visual representation of a pinboard, Individual images from www.stumbleupon.com, www.pinterest.com, and http://catchwordbranding.com. Compiled by Me. 

Now, once I had discovered these interesting articles and websites on Stumbleupon I needed a place to bookmark these websites. Now an important thing to realize about me is that I am a very visual person so I quickly get lost in a sea of www... links, so I began searching for a visual version of a bookmark list. This is where Pinterest comes in! Pinterest is essential a visual bookmarking website where you "pin" websites onto your online "pinboards", each customized for a particular interest or topic. With each pin you select an image from the website as its representation in your pinboard. As well, you are able to add a comment to the picture, as an added reminder of the website's content. Though most people post recipe and craft ideas onto Pinterest a little searching can find scientific articles. For the most part Pinterest is not very helpful in finding scientific/agricultural information, but for me it is extremely useful in storing and organizing the information I have found on other websites. In class we used delicious for a similar purpose but I found the site difficult to navigate and far too text based. Pinterest is much easier to navigate and the visual representation of information is far more condusive to my learning style.
One of my fellow students commented on the class blog:

Figure 2: Comment from the class blog. Click here to see the original. Image taken from www.ales204-2012.blogspot.com

Alyssa also found delicious difficult to navigate at first, but what really caught my attention in this comment is her comparison between Stumbleupon and delicious. I never thought about delicious being a more organized version of the random collection of information, known as Stumbleupon. In some ways I agree with this statement as I find though the information is organized in stacks , however sometimes the information within the stacks is quite random and assorted. The main difference I can see is that stumbleupon randomly takes viewers to the websites, while delicious takes you to lists of websites that you can sift through. In this way delicious is probably more efficient because you can look at an entire list and decide what you want to look at, instead of having to click past 10 useless sites before finding one of value. These are just a few of my thoughts about these various forms of social media and I hope it will persuade you to try out these websites to uncover or store information based on your own interests and passions.

Trying Out Facebook Pages

So today I had my second adventure in my social media journey. The use of a Facebook page as a type of resume, where employers can instantly access your employment background, education information, and any other relevant information you would typically include in a resume. I think this is a really neat way to share your resume because it is easy to edit and is environmentally friendly because you don't always have to print out your updated resume when something changes. Also, because most employers do Google searches on job candidates before hiring them, it gives the employer a very professional result, which emphasizes the candidates dedication and maturity.

I created a mock Facebook page for this assignment because this system is new to me and I was unsure about posting such personal information in a program I am unfamiliar with. However, if I had to do this assignment again I would probably make a personal Facebook page, because I am now more confident in the usefulness and value of this form of communication with employers. I also believe that I could use this program in the future when searching for a career.

From www.facebook.com. Click on image to enlarge.

I really like how fellow student Samantha Stevens states in her blog that even though her Facebook profile does not contain any inappropriate content, she likes how she can use a Facebook page to advertise herself in a more professional way. In creating my own Facebook page I spent some time looking at the Facebook pages of other people and organizations, such as Katie Davis (founder of Amazima Ministries) and the Columbus Zoo, to get some ideas.

Getting to Know Me!

Photo of me from summer 2011. From my personal collection.

My name is Lynda Forsyth and I am a second year student at the University of Alberta. Currently I am working towards my Bachelor of Science in Animal Health with a major in Food Animals, and I hope to someday work in either the horse or cattle industry. I have always been obsessed with horses. As a child, each week I would bring home armloads of books on different horse breeds from the library, and would spend hours absorbing all the information they contained. The passion continued, and when I was 16, I began to work at a summer horse camp; a program I have been hired to coordinate for the summer of 2012. In my first year of university I discovered a whole new world that most city kids are not given much opportunity to experience: agriculture.  Though I am still trying to figure out what exactly I want to do with my life, I know I am going to follow these passions both old and new.

In my experience I have found that the both the horse and agriculture industries are fairly tight-knit, as everyone seems to know everybody else. In this way, effective communication is essential when attempting to break into either of these fields. Currently, I am primarily using email and face-to-face conversations to develop a network, but I am interested to see how social networking websites could be used to reach even more possible employers across the country and maybe even around the world. I am also interested in the idea of communications and marketing for agricultural brands using social networking websites. I was not aware that major agricultural companies used sites like Twitter and Facebook until I read a blog by one of my classmates Dani Young who talked about how she follows Cargill on Twitter. Upon reading that information on her blog I decided to do some research of my own on how connected agricultural companies are on social networking sites and I found a presentation on http://www.slideshare.net/farmsdotcom/social-media-for-the-agriculture-industry. This presentation illustrated that 54% of producers use some form of social networking, and 18% of large producers use podcasts; statistics that are much higher than I expected.

I am planning to use this blog to further investigate the relationship between the agriculture industry and social networking websites, and I hope to learn how best to advertise my skills and experiences online for the purposes of my future career.

*Background image is from my personal photos