Revision as of 16:00, 19 December 2009

When contributing to Rhea, how do you picture your audience? How does this affect your posting?

• I think that probably 90% of the users of Rhea are Purdue students. The few that come across Rhea are probably just Google-searching a potential candidate (be it for graduate school, a job, etc.) and that person happened to post on Rhea with their full name. I find it very unlikely an employer will scope out Rhea for "insightful posts" and then contact a student, because doing so would require the employer to search Purdue's directory for usernames (assuming the Rhea user even signed his/her username). In short (or perhaps rather long in my case), I don't "hold my tongue" when posting on Rhea, because I think by and large only your classmates will really view the material. --rscheidt

• I post whatever I feel is appropriate for the topic I am posting under. I doubt many people actually read what you write anyways. I did stumble onto Spring 09s 438 rhea page while studying for 438 exam 2. That was interesting. --weim

• I think it does not matter when to contribute to Rhea. I choose to do it at the end of the semester because I can think of what I have done for one semester. I can picture myself better. It is a good creation where students can help each other without knowing each other. Also, because a lot of users are Purdue students, information posted on the Rhea is interesting to me. Every time I post something on the Rhea, I do understand anybody can read it. I personally do not pay much attention to the audience. I think Rhea, as an open source, should encourage students to say what they want to say but not being offensive or against the law. But maybe I should point out it is only my personal opinion and not always right.--pan11

• I feel that people who read these pages are:

1) The professor

2) People who are confused about the homework and are looking for help

3) The top 5-10% of the class

Based on this, just like in class, I still feel a little hesistant to ask questions, that in my opinion, are dumb. I am more likely to crawl the internet looking for a webpage such as Wikipedia that has the information I'm looking for. What I like about it is the pages that some of the students made for topics that related to ECE 438 that we weren't covering in class (i.e. more advanced image processing, mp3 encoding). I do feel that the homework collaboration has promise, but as it is now, it's easier just to go to office hours. Maybe if someone set up some sort of forum-like or chat box, it would be more user-friendly. --Pclay 13:07, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

• I picture my audience as other students who are also required to post something on a topic. Although it contains all of the material for some courses, students do not interact enough on Rhea for it to be a valuable teaching tool yet. I also believe that my professor for that respective course reads what I post so I try to make my posts more professional in style. --kheldman

• After performing a Google search for "Ryan Taylor Purdue," no pertinent results from Rhea appeared (they did when "rhea" was included as a search term, but recruiters will probably not do this), indicating that if a student is not a prolific contributor (and I comfortably fit into that category), employers will probably not stumble on their three page dissertation on "Applying Average Filtering in MATLAB to Improve Pictures of my Cat." However, as we discussed in class, if professors encouraged students to develop portfolios of their work from Semester One onwards, Rhea could be used as an aid in job-seeking. I tend to format posts in the context of a professional work environment, regardless of who I expect will be reading. This has the most flexibility (being understandable to students and not embarrassing to recruiters) and maintains Rhea's image as a reflection of the students in the courses it represents. --Ryan Taylor

• I picture my audience as other students that are taking or are going to take any of the classes in rhea. It still needs more work though, many people don't know about and the people that know about just use it because it is expected in their classes. For example, I just write on it when is asked from my professors. I would right contribution out of class requirements but I dont because I know not many are going to read it. It has a lot of potential but i think it would help a lot if it was used in for all classes so students get use to using it. --Carlos Leon

• When I am posting on Rhea, or anywhere else on the internet for that matter I like to ensure that it could be read by anyone without doing any damage to my reputation. That being said, I assume the Rhea audience who is reading what I have posted will be students from my class or perhaps the prof. Therefore I try to post in ways that demonstrate knowledge but I'm also not petrified to make a mistake because if I do then maybe someone such as another student from class or the teacher can correct it and that will be beneficial to me. In conclusion, I try to be knowledgeable on Rhea but am not as cautious about correctness as I would be if I was publishing something or being interviewed for a job. --cpfeiffe

• Personally, I think most of the audience for Rhea comes in the form of professors or students from Purdue. However, while writing these posts, I often think back to the open-source articles that I research when writing my pages, and how they are sometimes amazingly helpful in explaining concepts that text books and technical papers just cannot. In that regard, I try to make my pages as easy to relate to and follow as possible, without simplifying the material too much. I believe if some poor soul wants to learn about say upsampling tomorrow, and he's browsing for articles online, seeing a dog's picture as f[x,y] instead of just a symbol in a flow diagram would make much more sense. That might just be me, but I understand stuff much better with pictures and real world objects than mathematically. So in effect, I try to make my pages so that someone who has never seen the concept before can get it, without opening 15 other wikis, or drowning in a pool of math. Dlamba 19:25, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

• Rhea potentially has both a peer student audience and a professional audience and as such is a sort of odd mix of colloquial posts and professional articles. The need during learning to sometimes ask humiliating questions and also to be flat out wrong can at times be at odds with the desire to look professional. This has lead most of my posts to lean more towards presenting information instead of being used for interactive learning. --Mike Mitchell

• As a student outside of ECE, I had not had the opportunity to previously utilize RHEA. I feel that the majority of users are students that read/post for course purposes such as homework or lecture review. I would hope that professors utilize RHEA to determine if student postings reflect an understanding of concepts. In addition, I feel that RHEA material is a good tool to evaluate students when applying for research positions. I would not suspect that prospective employers search RHEA specifically for student postings, but may happen across the pages in an internet search. As a student, the prospective readers of RHEA don’t influence my postings positively or negatively. However, I am hesitant to post questions when it is possible to directly correspond with the professor or teaching assistant. Also, I do feel that there is a large reliance on the RHEA resource, and I found myself occasionally surprised when material (i.e. Homework assignments) were posted on RHEA without in class announcement. --Michael Nolte

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