Education Section > Communication
LIS4708 - Perspectives on Information Technology
Spring 2008
Instructor: Dr. Mia Liza Lustria
This course was one of the last required courses for the major. The major project in this course was creating this interactive resume. Early on in the course we were required to work on a sample wireframe for our interactive resume (IR). I can easily say that the wireframe I created for that assignment looks nothing like this site does right now. I did not decide on this design until much later in the semester. I was quite pleased with how this design worked out, especially with the dark blue and the red color scheme.
This IR was not supposed to be a place to just showcase our samples. It was intended to showcase everything we had done throughout the program. During the course we had to work on a lot of assignments that would assist us in creating content for this IR. For example, the assignments we did included creating the education section, work experience section, the mission and vision statements, as well as the miscellaneous pages for the IR. So in essence, all semester long we worked on the IR. With the assignments being broken down like they were, we were able to get feedback on the content that we wrote for each section. This allowed us to improve on the content before placing it on the actual IR. By the time it came around to finalizing the IR, we had all the content ready, it was merely touching it up and putting it all together.
The assignments I mentioned contained most of the content that you see on this site. As you can see, I am verbose at times, but I enjoy being detailed and thorough. I like explaining things in very great detail. Due to this detail, and my writing ability, when it came time for the information in those assignments to be reviewed, the instructor had very little to say as the content I wrote fit what they were looking for. I followed the directions as closely as I could (something I felt other students always seemed to neglect) and I felt that the content that I had written for my site was far superior to any of the content written by my classmates. Apparently so did the instructors and the industry professionals who reviewed all IRs from my class and gave out awards. My hard work and detail paid off in the end when I received the prestigious award for the Overall Best Interactive Resume for the Spring 2008 semester.
In between working on content for the IR, we were also taught how to prepare a very good resume as well as how to market and sell ourselves. Through the IR and these other assignments, I learned a lot about how to market myself and showcase my skills and qualifications. I also learned how to properly organize my paper resume so that it is quickly reviewable and effective.
On top of the IR, we also had a major project in this course, which was our communication project. For this project you could have chosen to either do a how-to-video tutorial or a white paper. Having written a lot of papers in my day, I felt that doing a video tutorial would not only be more fun, but would also allow me to learn new technical skills that I had not been able to before, such as video editing and recording. So, I decided to do a How-To-Video tutorial. To complete this tutorial I had to learn a great deal about editing and recording video, as well as figuring out screen recording software such as Camtasia Studio. This how-to-video I completed not only allows me to demonstrate some of my technical skills, it shows that I am capable of instructing others in how to learn technologies.
This course by far had some of the most work of any of the courses in the major, but it also had some of the most important work in my opinion. This IR is a fantastic way to get my name out there and it allows companies to see a plethora of information about me that my paper resume simply cannot. From this course I was able to get a lot of various skills that I had not gotten in any of the other courses before it, such as the video editing and the self marketing. By gaining these skills from this course (and the various skills from the other courses), I feel I have obtained a very strong, diversified skill set that will set me apart from other IT professionals.
Skills Acquired
- Video Editing & Recording
- Self Marketing
- Camtasia Studio
Samples
- How-To-Video Tutorial - This is my how-to-video tutorial that I completed for the communication project. This video
demonstrates how to create, configure and interact with a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine. Also, the supplemental manual for the
video can be found below.
View the How-To-Video Tutorial
Download the How-To-Video Manual (PDF)
- (265 KB)
