Derek Echevarria Personal Project Drumbeat Proposal

1) Strategy

a) What’s the goal?

Being a college athlete, I always felt that I had a connection with the athletes around me. So my plan in life is to be able to work with them on a more personal level. This would tie into being a sports agent. It would allow me to represent amateur athletes on their way to big leagues. Part of being a sports agent includes the ability to scout the current and future talent pools for potential clients. So I have created a blog, braking down current talents strengths and weaknesses based on their performance in the NFL combine events. The problem I’m trying to solve is to improve my ability to evaluate future clients. The opportunity is a lot of money in the future. The itch I’m trying to scratch is the opportunity to work with athletes.

b) What already exists?

Sports agents are usually unaware of the skills it takes to be a good athlete. They rely on paper information to represent their potential. I’m going to us my experience from being on the field to actually evaluate them in depth in a way that paper can’t. This would make me understand players on the field to tell if they are worth struggling for at the next level. I am collaborating with an existing website to focus on the task at hand.

c) Who are you trying to reach?

I plan to attract sports agents, in potentially landing an internship with them. This will allow me to learn from them and take in the key skills I need in being a sports agent.

d) Why are you passionate about this??

What brought me to the project, my personal background and my strengths is all the same; I am a football player.

e) How does your idea make the web or the world better?

This might sound a little selfish but this idea would not make a world a better place. This would possibly start a trend; more athletes would drive into being a sports agent instead of every athlete striving to be the next Michael Jordan.

2) Story

1. Research and Gather info

2. Create the prototype blog

3. Gain the necessary publicity.

4. Land the internship; learn and network with others.

5. The experience/networking would land me a job.

1. Researching and Gathering information.

In order for me to create this blog, I need to research and acquire certain information that will allow me to evaluate the NFL athlete. Since I can’t make the trip to Indianapolis to attend the combine, I would rely on the NFL Network on television to provide me the insight I need in order to evaluate potential NFL stars. I would also websites such as espn.com and the nfl.com to provide me statistics I might have missed or not seen. Articles would be mention but on a limited bases. This information would allow me to research recruits in an analytical way.

2. Creating the prototype blog space with the collaborating website.

This is where it gets difficult. As I mention in my strategy, I will collaborating with an already existing website. My blog would be a branch out to existing website’s college section. My job would be specifying on college football players in the NFL combine from the information I have gain doing my research.

3. Gain the necessary publicity.

Collaborating with this existing website is a great step for me. It will allow me to gain the website’s attracted users to jump start my blog’s publicity. This is where the “word of mouth” philosophy comes in. If my work is good, the viewers would talk about it in the hopes it will fall in the right hand.

4. Land the internship; learn and network with others.

With the hopes of my blog falling into the right hands, multiple internship with be offered. During these internships, I would try to absorb the necessary skills and develop unique skills into becoming the agent that I see myself being. Also, using these internships to network with other co-workers and existing companies marketing my idea to them.

5. The experience/networking would land me a job.

Hoping one of my networking personnel will like my ideas and past experiences and would provide me a spot in the agency allowing me to create relationships and represent them as their sports agent through my philosophy.

personal project map

Learning Journal Mid-term Review

When I first entered into this course I did not know what to expect.  To be honest, I didn’t know what social media actually meant until now. It basically means different ways to communicate on the World Wide Web. During this class, we create blogs on the website http://www.wordpress .com. by using these blogs we will reflect on the teaching that was shown during that day or perhaps week. Buy posting it on the website, it allows you to share it with the class and the professor. We also did a Co-teaching project; student on student teaching which help a lot. As far as for the learning journals, they’re not helping at all. I think what where getting into now like the FYE project and the personal project, along with the co-teaching would be a better philosophy for learning in this class.

The Quora Experience

Quora is a very unique program. It’s kind of like askjeeves.com, which I use to us a lot in high school. I have learned that the idea of this program is a question/answer. It allows you to ask questions, also allowing other users to answer your question. My first Quora question was about being a sports agent. Although no one answered that question, it connected me to a question about agents that were on Quora. In conclusion, that helped me to connect to real sports agents to ask them about their job personally. I think that can help with my FYE and personal project, connecting me to other through question.

Response to Social Media Co-Teaching

As I was co-teaching, I’ve learn a lot about not Facebook but LinkIn. I was experimenting with LinkIn and found that this is a very useful tool for my future. It’s a he networking program allowing you to market yourself for future job offerings by corporation. A neat feature about it is that allow you to upload your resume. It’s also very helpful to my FYE and personal project, allowing me to connect with Alfred Alumni about my idea.

 

“The” iGoogle Dashboard

As I come to notice, iGoogle dashboard is a huge file cabinet. It’s a way to organize your internet uses, mainly websites. When organizing your internet uses, it allows you to categorize them. For example, as I was developing my dashboard I separated my common internet into three categorize; Comm 200 representing all websites used for that class, Social network representing my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and Sports entertainment representing the websites I use to keep up on the sports media. The can be an awesome tool for our FYE project because it helps organize ideas found on the internet as far as websites and online documents.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/181517/google_dashboard_a_closer_look.html

To Tweet or Not to Tweet, That is the Question.

Tweeting seems like an  entertaining thing to do. Maybe the new Myspace, or Facebook. I think not!!!!

Twitter is known as the social network that allows you to answer the modern day casual question, “what are you doing’.  This is done by sending short text messages called “tweets”, with a capacity of 140 characters. The beauty of twitter is that you can share information with people that you would not normally exchange or IM messages with, opening up your circle of contacts to an ever-growing community of like-minded people. Twitter also ties into TweetDeck, which is an application that allows you to organize, update, and handle all the @ replies, direct messages, retweets and updates that come up on your profile page. Using twitter from tweetdeck , could be useful in group project. Tweetdeck allows you to organize those you are following into groups based on relation to you, interests, and location. You can also use features like TwitPic and TwitsScoop which saves time and allows you to upload photos and link right on your tweetdeck dashboard.

As far as using it for the FYE project… Twitter would be a difficult social media to used. Its is possible to get your idea out there in the open so that the person thats following you could see, but that would take some time depending if the person uses twitter frequently or not. i know i would be using it to often.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1656515/what_is_tweetdeck_for_twitter.html

http://tweeternet.com/#tools

Devine Intervention

Is he the Next West Virginia Hero?

Noel Devine

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