All Good Things Must Come To An End..

Before the semester had begun, I had no idea what to expect from Communication 107. The 'communication' part seemed pretty common sense and as a freshman, I was completely unfamiliar with the number system of "107's" and so forth. After signing up, I somewhat expected the worst. A tough college writing course that's less beneficial to my future and more focused on grades. I personally dislike those kinds of classes. A classes goal should be to give you skills and knowledge that will benefit you down the road. Although no course completely ignores grades, this Comm 107 class was more focused on more important things.

Although no class is without its shortfalls, I enjoyed many aspects of the class. The theme around the class, that we must not only get better at face to face communication but also improve and explore new forms of communication was interesting and pertinent to everyone in the class. I never realized how much communication, and I'm not only talking about facebook.com, but exchange of information happens online. This was my first formal introduction to Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networking sites. This was especially pertinent to my major of Business and played in to Marketing. The speakers that presented were also interesting but not all of them were big enough 'players' in their field. The blog aspect was a great edge on the class that forced me to engage in non-formal writing and through a new median. Only thing I would add is more blog posts that were just for fun. Like posting links and updates more frequently and not being graded on it. If that was encouraged, I'm sure there would have been participation. But it was a new experience for me and a fun one.

In terms of the class, 8am was really tough for me. Although I only missed several classes, it made me tired for the rest of the day. But it is what it is. The teaching style was great. I liked that we were not lectured to but engaged in the class. Even more of the 'learning activities' would've been nice but the ones we had were a lot of fun (the creepy stalker in stamp, group activity, speech analysis). I thought that if we had more improvisational speeches too, that would've have been very beneficial. The speeches that we have had have really helped me get over stage 'anxiety' and I feel a lot more comfortable speaking in front of people.

For the persuasive speech, I thought that it was very interesting putting together a speech and taking into consideration what we learned in class about different appeals and applying it. I feel my speech really benefited from the addition of small pointers that I learned from class. I also liked how we could learn from the mistakes we made on the informal speech and apply them to the persuasive speech. It would have actually been interesting to see though how many people were actually persuaded by our speeches. If we could some how have a system (does not have to be open) in which people gave constructive criticism to the person that presented and told them how persuasive they were, I feel that would've been beneficial.

All in all, it has been a great semester. Like I said in the beginning of the blog post, I enjoyed the class because I was taught and practiced skills that I can apply in the future. The information we gained was practical and Andi, you seemed like you really loved teaching us and wanted us to succeed in what we did. Sincerely, thank you for a great class. And thanks to everyone else, it has been fun :)

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