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

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