After spending some time this week reading through Dennen's article on pseudonymity, I thought it best to focus next on building a web-presence that wasn’t pseudonymous. Thus, I read through Creating an Intentional Web Presence: Strategies for Every Educational Technology Professional by Lowenthal, Dunlap, and Stitson.  Interestingly, the authors start by noting that no longer do most hiring committees look to web-presence to find reasons not to hire someone. Instead they look to web-presence now to validate why they should hire someone. Especially for those in the educational technology space, their web presence is of particular importance in the job search.

Currently working in Career Services myself, I found the article to be very thorough and a great checklist of both the items that one should have on the web and also the quality of those items. Often at the Career Center we give presentations to classes on social media use and personal branding and this article took many of those concepts to the next level as it focused on the added level of engagement needed for someone whose role is focused on using technology to improve the educational process.

            One aspect of the development of a web-presence that fit well with the first article that I read this week from Dennen was the emphasis on using social media and other areas of your web-presence to build your community of industry professionals, or tribe, as the authors refer to it as. This not only will help you as you network in your field but signals to others, such as hiring committees, the type of person that you are based on your personal network.