The student job finder is aimed at helping new students find a job from one source rather then several. For new students most jobs can be placed into 2 main categories: Part time and Voluntary.
Retail provides many part time student jobs mostly due to the ease of getting a job however there are more options open for students. An Example can be tutoring where a student is using their existing skills to earn money.
Voluntary jobs include those where a student would probably want to help out, especially for societies and charities. Both types of jobs can be found on email lists, websites and through word of mouth.
As the number of job sources increases the breadth of the search a student has to do to look for a fitting job can be quite large especially for those students initially arriving at university.
Student friend finder
The aim of the friend finder is to help students find their friends/other like minded people.
The phone a familiar instant communication device is almost common to every student. However the phone usually costs credit/money to make calls and texts and can take a while to find out if everyone is going out. You've also got to have a number for your friend.
The social network profile e.g. facebook, myspace, hi5... are all populated by vast numbers of students even before they come to university. Social networks provide very useful profile information and features such as access to profile 24 hours a day, creating events, groups... The disadvantages of social networks are lack of instant communication and a reliance on an internet connection which is usually a computer at home. Although facebook does have a mobile site, I've not known anyone who interfaces with their site in this way.
The student friend finder device merges the two ideas by using the adhoc ability of a phone's bluetooth connectivity (could also be zigbee/wifi or something else) to find other users running the software and looking up matching bits of information. The friend finder will only alert the user when a successful match has been found e.g. both students are looking for "computer science" students.
They may then each receive a message (this depends on their settings) alerting them about this new user. If the user is already one of their friends then it may just alert them or do nothing.
Disadvantages may include:
- Stalking if a user has too much profile information displayed, system could warn user before hand.
- Popular users could have too many requests to handle, a cap may be placed on requests within a specific time period.
No comments:
Post a Comment