Monday, November 1, 2010

TWITTER

What I think of twitter?  Well I think it is a tool that is useful when communicating with other people but it has not quite caught on to become as popular as facebook yet.  Because it is not that popular it is hard for teenagers, like myself, to want to spend the time to use it frequently.  When I get on twitter I always find myself thinking that it is that same thing as facebook but all you can do is update your status.  I also sometimes think that twitter is not very good at marketing who you really are to the business world.  In lecture we were told that you can use it to branch out to future employers however I find it difficult to imagine that a random employer would really pay attention to a student in school just talking about what they are doing for the day.  With that being said I think that we need to learn how to use twitter more effectively.  Instead of just telling about what you are doing for the day I think that we should try to tell people about interesting sites that are similar to the job market that we are interested in.  If we show more of the kind of person we are by posting links to describe us and tell about our personality it would be far more effective than just updating our statuses. 

Twitter I believe is a tool and a distraction.  Today in class we were talking about time wasters, and this is just another form of them.  When I think of how much time I spend on facebook it makes me want twitter to not become as popular because I would be afraid that even more time wasting would be spend on twitter.  Personally I believe that technology has absorbed to much of our life and we depend on it to much.  I know that I certainly do and could not function with out my cell phone, computer, and facebook.

Finally I am glad that I was given the experience to try twitter out for two weeks but personally I believe that is all that I will be doing with twitter for a while.  Until twitter becomes a necessity in our society I do not think it will be of use to the younger generation that is so use to facebook, we have enough complaints when just one thing is changed on facebok (ex. see friendship) that I can not see us wanting to change an entire social network.  And as seen with facebook and Myspace there is only room for one popular social network and I for one hope it stays facebook!

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Diversity Event

Case for Diversity

I attended the diversity lecture A Business Case for Diversity. It was the worst lecture that I have ever had to sit through….it even beat calculus and chemistry hands down! The demonstration was completely a snooze. I honestly only learned one thing from the lecture…that society works best if there is a diversity. In the presentation they had a slide dying that if you have a group of six really super smart braincase they will not work as good together to solve a problem compared to a group of six individuals with all different intelligent levels.

I believe the reason that this lecture was so boring was that the business man who was teaching it was using mathematical equations such as relating the Fibonacci sequence (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,…..) to how we learn and how we are diverse. Us, as students cannot possibly comprehend the relation of these mathematical equations if we haven’t had some kind of Calculus background.

This lecture was not anything that I would have expected. I thought that it was going to be about welcoming all the students of different diversities together, and how that can improve the business aspect of Iowa State University. I was sadly mistaken and it was ten times worse than what I had originally thought. Overall I learned almost nothing from this presentation and would never recommend anyone going to it ever!

Monday, October 11, 2010

Put your Best Foot Foward

        So a time in which I, Angela Dunlay, have been at my best has been when my sister left home for college last year.  My mother, bless her soul, is the kindest women you will ever meet.  She also I feel has a serious separation anxiety with her daughters.  Last year when my sister went off to UNI she had a little bit of difficulties with seperating with my sister.  So I came up with a cleaaver invention, to get a dog to replace my sister.  It worked quite nicely and I had always wanted a dog and my sister hated dogs so we could never get one.  Now that she was off to college it was the perfect opportunity.  Our dogs name is Emma and she was exactly what my mother needed to get her through this rough transition.

      My mother and I trained Emma like we tried to train my sister for years, and too our amazement she was actually trained in 6 short months. the transition to college is always difficult for parents I believe but it is always good for us to leave home and experience the world without your parents supervision all of the time.  This is a time that I have felt I have been at my best because I helped my mother when she was going through a difficult time.

     Being at your best I believe dose not always mean that you have to be winning at something it can sometimes just mean that you are helping someone out to the best of your abilities.  I feel that helping a loved one out in the end is much more rewarding and teaches you life long lessons.  Lessons that I learned from hleping my mother deal with my sister move away were learning that everything must change at some point.  No matter how much I loved my sister and wanted her to stay at home both me and my mother knew she belonged in college which also helped us with letting her go.

     This year I left home, and I suggested another dog but my mother said one was enough so I'm thinking of getting her a fish for Christmas :)

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Beloit College Mindset List

The Beloit College Mindset List releases a list every year that describes the lives of the students entering college in the fall of 2014.  The way that the list describes the students’ lives is by describing norms that they have in their lives.  This is a way for people of other generations to understand what the class of 2014 is all about.  The list describes how our technology generation differs from past generations.
Some of the items on the list however depict the class of 2014 as inconsiderate and rather unintelligent.  For instance when the list says, “few in the class know how to write cursive” this is completely untrue.  We do not like to use cursive but if we had to we could write in it.  I also don’t think that you can accurately say that everyone in the class of 2014 do or do not know how to write in cursive.   A statement that Beloit Midlist addresses, “Al Gore has always been animated,” indicates that the class of 1014 has had no interest or knowledge in politics which is once again grouping all of the students into one way of thinking.
                In this article I believe for most part was dead on about the class of 2014.  I think that the majority of the items on the list accurately described how the class of 2014 lives and how we grew up.   A statement on the list that I believe was the most like me was,” Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-sucker at Hemery High.” I have to admit that I myself do enjoy the vampire series, twilight, so it made me relate to the list more. This statement addresses how the craze for vampires has explode in our lifetime.  It seems that every show and movie filmed have something to do with vampires.  This is just one of the statements that address very accurately how our environment is like.
                In this list I believe that it is a good representation of how our culture is different from past generations.  This article really opens people from all generations and backgrounds to more clearly understand the different environments that everyone comes from.  This list makes me want to understand past generations more and to look at past Beloit list from previous years.  From the list compiled from Beloit I think it’s pretty clear that the 1014 generation  is a pretty good generation to be living in.