As one of the first classes that I have been apart of at the University of Maryland, I would have to say this class was the most similar to the ones I had in high school. I think this was a good thing because all of my other classes are big lecture classes and sometimes its hard to pay attention and retain information that way. Also, for those classes it can be hard because there are only a few assignments besides exams which do not necessarily test your knowledge in the class. I liked the fact that the class was on the blog because it gave us many opportunities for assignments so that we had a better chance of getting a higher grade in the class. All of the blog posts and comments and everything else that we had to do all added up to a pretty heavy part of our grade which helped out a lot. I liked the assignments that we had to do and I think the grading rubrics were very reasonable. I would have to say that my favorite assignments were the informative brief and the persuasive speech. Unlike for some classes, we got to pick topics that we were familiar with which helped a lot. Some people would say that we had an advantage being able to pick our own topics, but in the real world we will be familiar with out jobs and most of the things in our field so this was very realistic. Thats another point about this class that I liked: it was very realistic and real world oriented. As we move toward using technology more and more in our everyday lives, it only makes sense to incorporate it in the classroom so that we can get some more real world experience.
I also liked the persuasive speech because one of the main reasons we speak into todays is to convince someone that something is better or anything else. I was curious to see how well my persuasive skills actually were in terms of being able to convince the class of something that I believed in. I used to speak a lot at my church and my school as well as play my bass on stage a lot in high school for all of the concerts I played in. You would think that I would be completely natural being on stage and no stage fright at all, but even still, I get a little nervous when I get in front of people because I think its just human nature to not be as comfortable speaking in front of large groups and be in the spotlight like that. Especially with presenting a topic on which you do not know much about, when you have to speak in public it can be easy to forget many of the main points you are going to speak about. I know for me personally for both my informative brief and my persuasive speech I talked about things that I was very familiar with and things that I know a lot about. The only reason I was able to be somewhat comfortable is because I was not completely dependent on my notes, because I was so familiar with the information.
As much as I liked the informative brief and the persuasive speech, I did not really like the group project as much. The main reason was because I thought we were going to be in groups of people that shared at least similar majors as ourselves. It made it very difficult to come up with a central topic to use when we had every major from criminology to business to biology. As hard as it was, we eventually came up with a topic, which unfortunately I could not relate to because I did not know anything about law since I am not going into law. This also made my interview harder because I could not really relate to the lawyer in any way. Even still, I think it kind of defeated the purpose of the assignment which was to benefit you by being able to talk to someone in your own field.
Even though I wrote a lot about this, it was not really that big of a deal when you look at the grand scheme of things. Overall, I think this class was very useful and I liked the fact that we had the blog to consolidate the class all in one place. Communication is in every aspect of life whether we realize it or not. This clip is from pulp fiction and I think it is one of the best representations of communication as a whole. Also, this scene is a staple in movie history.
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