Yesterday in class we had the honor of a Skype session with Henry Jenkins. Dr. Jenkins is the author of many books including "Convergence Culture," which we have been using in class. He is a professor, innovator, and all-around social media guru. I think I can speak for the entire class when I say that we were a little intimidated to actually speak to him even from as far away as MIT (thank you, Skype). Luckily, we were prepared. The conversation started with Dr. Jenkins giving us a run-down of his life and his experience with social media. That alone was impressive and educating. He has a long-running history with journalism, teaching, writing, researching and living out the new technology and way of social media. Each of us in the class had prepared questions to ask Dr. Jenkins so we could gain even a little bit of the knowledge he could share with us.
I was really impressed with a lot of the questions from people in my class. Not only were the answers to his questions insightful (and a little bit over my head), but the questions posed by my classmates were thought-provoking and challenging themselves.
I asked Dr. Jenkins about how we, as college graduates or future college graduates can effectively use social media without over-using it. Dr. Jenkins graciously explained that forming connections and being involved with networking is incredibly important when it comes to venturing into the job market. He encouraged us to use social media sites such as Facebook to gain and keep connections with people that we can network with in the future.
I thought it was interesting that Dr. Jenkins brought up the idea of collective intelligence. He mentioned that this phenomenon helps us to understand what is really going on because no one knows everything, but everyone knows something.
Thank you, Dr. Jenkins for joining our class!
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