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

Creative Thinking

There aren't many times that I've experienced in college thus far where I have seen two non related classes start to overlap, but recently this Com 320 class and my Entrepreneurial class have started to do so. Lately in class we have been talking about thinking outside of the box, and that has been a point of emphasis all year in ENTR 200. Im starting to realize that even if the exercises that we have been doing may seem kind of funny, they are all meant at changing how you approach problems that you encounter. You have to change your perception if you want to learn how to think outside the box. In our ENTR class we got a "thinking outside the box" exercise which is a great example of how to think creatively to solve a problem. The link for the exercise is here: http://www.officerave.com/blog/id_29-logic-puzzles-think-outside-the-box-puzzle.html. The challenge is to connect all of the dots with four straight lines without lifting your pen. Thinking outside the box is important to become a successful entrepreneur as well as being a good problem solver which is what I have been learning here in Com 320.

-Sam Brooks

Interesting Times

I know we have been studying creative thinking in class and I have tried to use this while explaining to my bosses why we shouldn't have to stay at pappy's until midnight on saturdays for the after hours catering service. I've gone the logical way by stating how much money we lose by only serving one person from nine to midnight, and that didn't work. Recently I took a poll from all the employees from pappy's and rack 'n roll bowling alley that are tied up in this catering event and they all agree that we shouldn't be doing this. Guess what, that didn't work either. So last weekend on Halloween I decided to take a more creative route and throw a little shock value into it. I closed the store two and a half hours earlier than normal and we all walked out. Yes, this may not have been the smartest move to make but nothing else was working, and yes I did recieve a warning but it got their attention and they held a meeting because of it. Due to the action that I took, the catering after hours event that we are doing for the bowling alley will be canceled at the end of the semester and one person each saturday will be allowed to leave the store two hours earlier than the other two employees that must stay. This wasn't the result we were expecting, but at least now the ball is rolling in the right direction.

James Costner

Visual Aids

During class this week we returned to our normal groups. We were asked to draw our solutions on a piece of paper that described what we were going to do with our problem. Our solution/problem was no natural light coming into the classroom. In order to have this we would dig out the road and place a window in our classroom. It was tough to explain how we would perform this project. Our visual aid was very helpful at this point because the class was able to understand what exactly we were intending. This proves that visual aids can help an audience understand what is being said.

Jeff Lindsay

Small Group Communication - Practices

Communication 320 (concise overview): A study of group thinking and problem-solving methods; participation in, and evaluation of, committee, and informal discussion groups. Focus on the roles, networks, and messages employed by small group communicators.
According to the syllabus, This course emphasizes experiential learning where you learn by doing. The final project is designed to develop effective efficiency and work styles using communication.

I do not believe the Service Learning Project is an effective means of accomplishing the previous benchmarks. Although it is my opinion that many of the colleges within Purdue University no longer place the deserved emphasis on "hands on learning", I find in this instance it to be a detrimental education style. The group project is an unnecessary teaching technique for Com 320, because, students are exposed to small groups throughout their collegiate careers; examples of these groups include: social groups, clubs, study groups, group projects, etc; therefore exposing them to another is: redundant, tedious, wastes time and instructional opportunities. Students are familiar with groups and seldom do groups fail at tasks, but success or failure is an inadequate test of communication. There can be poor group health and still successes made within the group. Perhaps the group even partially dissolved or shut down and all the requirements were met or exceeded. That surely does not mean there was excellent group communication. Conversely there can be groups that constantly communicate but rarely make timely decisions and this is a failure. To learn how to resolve such issues Purdue offers many Organizational Leadership and Supervision courses many of which have labs where learning by doing takes place. Instead emphasis needs to be placed on identifying why individual members of a group are using specific styles of verbal and nonverbal communication and how to effectively reach out and communicate with them. This will be a tough and uncomfortable assignment because it will expose each group member's flaws. It can be uncomfortable to listen to and criticism can sometimes be harsh, but this is about correcting mistakes now, in a safe environment, so they are not painfully learned in the workplace. This requires well orchestrated activities with peer and instructional commentary. An excellent example of this was on October 21st. It was not without flaws, however, the assignment could have instead I envision have a situation where a group is observed by the entire class and then an open forum that lasts perhaps two periods to discuss communication within the group.

Everyone can identify a poor or excellent communicator, but what makes each one so. This must be identified and spoken plainly about so successes can be duplicated and shared by all in the group. Only then can problem solving methods be formulated that improve the functionality of the small group.