Project Presentations

Last time we met in class my group and I started making our presentation. We came up with some of the requirements needed for a satisfactory presentation. We decided on what our forms of new media will be, as well as started writing about what we learned individually from our event. With help from Jasmine we also did a good job of critically thinking about what happened during the event and how we could have done things better. I personally think that we should have done a better job organizing the guests that entered our area. The major issue we faced that contributed to a lack of structure was the rotation of volunteers that we had. Our volunteers weren't able to come so we had to continually prep new volunteers, which was almost impossible while the event was going on. I think we should have done a better job of getting solid commits from our volunteers prior to the week of the event. Overall day 2 of our event ran exponentially better than day 1 because we learned from some mistakes made on day 1. I think that we are going to have plenty to talk about during our presentation.

Sam Brooks

Service Learning Presentations

Last week we started preparing for our service learning presentations. These presentations will have to be at least 40 minutes long so our group has a lot of work to do to prepare for our presentation. Due to the nature of the assignment and the amount of work involved, this will be a good opportunity for our group to display some of the things that we have been learning in COM 32o this year. On Friday I thought that my group members and I did a good job of organizing our thoughts to develop a solid game plan. We followed along the presentation requirements sheet to help us structure our discussion and wrote down the points that each person brought up in regards to the requirements. We also talked about some creative solutions to the requirement of multiple sources of new media having to be a part of the presentation. Monday we plan to start piecing our presentation together by doing things such as pulling our pictures from the actual event off of our digital cameras, and assigning portions of the presentation to each group member to work on over break.

Sam Brooks

Ouch

Well I have finally gotten my computer fixed so am able to get on here again. This one may be a little late, but I was just now able to get my thumb to stop bleeding all over the place. That's a different story though. Right now I'm going to blog about miss-communication. Today I was supposed to be somewhere around 2:00, so I left my house around 1:30. I spend about 20 minutes looking for the place before I decide to grab a handout that is in one of the campus buildings. After about 40 minutes of driving following the instructions of the handout, I call a friend and she tells me I'm most likely going the wrong way down 231. Once I get back to campus I decided to try going north on 231 just to see if that was the way I was supposed to go. Keep in mind that it is now 4:00 PM and I'm over 2 hours late. 10 minutes down the road I see a street that I've spent the last 2 and a half hours looking for. This is what happens when the directions say travel south and the place you are looking for is north of where you started. Luckily one of the people that I needed to meet with was still there, but I missed the others that were there originally.

James Costner

Humor and communication

Humor is an excellent way to communicate a point. In order to be effective it must be concise and memorable. Humor helps commit key points to memory which should be the objective of every good teacher. Here are excellent examples.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tGq3tH4qSw

Creative Workshop

Last week in class was involved creative thinking from each member of the class and their groups. It was interesting to see what group members came up with for their creative workshop. Each group came up with something totally different from everyone elses. Each group presented a problem where groups had to find solutions on how to succeed. The main problem with this activity was the time constants and finding the best solution. This just represents communication is key to finding the right answers. Every problem groups received, they just looked for the first easy solution and all agreed. Overall I thought the activity was very fun and interesting.

Jeff Lindsay

Cigaretts and Communication

What? So how are these two things related? First some back story. I have two roommates one who smokes and the other with a nasty uppercut; know from experience. The first one, the smoker, made the other sware an oath that if he ever caught the smoker (smoking) to bust him in the face; for you see the smoker wanted to quit and only threat of his life would make him quit. Well the smoker started up smoking and the other roommate has just started to suspect him doing so. How can this be that someone could successfully have evade punishment for a month even though an entire floor of guys were aware of the situation?
It is important to remember in communication that no matter how trustworthy a person may seem they can and will still deceive. Individuals do what is in their best interest first. This is especially true in this situation. Despite the fact that the smoker has serious social flaws, he managed to gain support in his deception. This had nothing to do with any of his own abilities of persuasion it had to do with human nature. No matter how bad an underdog is society cant see him fail. This is because inspite what people thing society is often not attracted to the most power or authoritative force. They will resist the hegemonic force and participate in the deception.

Creativity

This week we were focusing on creativity workshops and problem solving skills. This is something that I usually find enjoyable. I like challenging myself to think of creative solutions to problems. It is also a good way to build team cohesion and trust. I found the group's activity on friday to be both challenging and fun. I thought that our solution was ingenious and it ended up working so that was a plus. I'm looking forward to the other groups' activities.

David Brelage