Looking at Website designs
I've been helping my mom figure out what website design to use for her company and I realized that even though everyone says 'it's what's inside what really counts' most people have a first impression of everything, from people to websites to books, everything. And it's so hard NOT to have a first impression of things. I think the internet is changing first impressions a lot because if you meet someone online and you never meet them face-to-face and never have the chance to create your impression of how they look then maybe you think differently about them than if you had met face-to-face first. Also, with online classes like this one where classmates never meet each other and students may never meet their instructor. It would be a neat experiment if students learned better in a class where they didn't know if the teacher was male, female, married, single, white, black, or anything else. Or if they could guess if a classmate or teacher was male or female. I was reading this article yesterday in the New York Times about how people in minorities are being forced to choose between blending in with the norm or sticking out and being punished for it. Someone did an experiment with job applications. She turned in two of the same applications to many different companies but with two different names on them. One had a white sounding name and the other had a latino sounding name. The white sounding name got many more call backs than the latino sounding name.
posted by Cassie @ 1/16/2006 01:10:00 PM
1 Comments:
I've given a great deal of thought to this question too, Cassie. For example, at first --when setting up the course--I thought I should require everyone to post a picture of themselves so we could see each other's faces. Then I realized there might be more advantages in NOT knowing what someone else looked like.
Your story about the resumes is sad but true (in my experience). Had a student named "Joaquin" recently who had lots of prior experience in the computer industry. He was having trouble finding work and we couldn't figure out why. When he changed the name on his resume from Joaquin to Joe, he got far more callbacks. We'd all love to think this doesn't happen anymore in 21st Century America (especially in northern California) but I'm afraid the truth is a different story.
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