At the beginning of the term I was
actually terrified to learn that ALES 204 was going to be social
media based. Computers have always been an obstacle for me and thus,
I am usually one of the last to sign up for social media sites like
Facebook and Twitter. One of the first assignments was signing up for
Twitter which, of course, I had yet to do. I had always just thought
of Twitter as a site for people making random irrelevant statuses.
Thinking back to a class on Twitter, I remember Jess showed us a
video on what most people thought about Twitter; there were random
tweets going up everywhere! That was exactly my impression of Twitter
but then we learned how organized and helpful Twitter could actually
be. Hash tagging, as we learned, makes it possible for you to search
a specific topic and find links to pages that people have found
useful to them. Twitter can also be used as a substitute for your
local news report, as people often tweet faster than the news
reporters can communicate the information. The only thing I would
have to disagree with is that it can be used professionally. I still
do not agree with this statement because a tweet limits your update
to 140 characters so a person is often forced to use abbreviations or
text language so they can fit everything into one tweet. If I was
using Twitter to communicate with a boss, for example, I definitely
would not want to be using slang like “b/c.” All in all though,
becoming comfortable with Twitter has definitely helped me not only
in this class but in my academic career and my personal life.
This was me before ALES 204:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/twitter%20funny/RoseKeller/Funny/twitter.jpg?o=1
Another great thing we learned about
was poster presentations. Although it was quite confusing at the
beginning in lab, things quickly came together when working with our
groups. At first I didn't understand that the idea was essentially to
limit the amount of writing and increase the amount of pictures, flow
charts, and diagrams. Not only creating a poster presentation but
particularly witnessing my peers' presentations was extremely helpful
for me to realize how much more effective a visual presentation is
than a slide full of writing. A slide of visuals really maintains the
audience's interest, whereas paragraphs of writing is more likely to
lose their attention. This, for me, was one of the most relevant
things I learned this semester because I will definitely have to do a
presentation sometime in the future and now I have a really good idea
of how to set it up.
It was fun interacting with others in
the class by commenting on other student's blog posts. I enjoyed
learning about other students who were in the same program as myself
and where they were in their journey and their experiences so far.
The only downfall to this type of interaction is you don't get the
same connection with the person as you do in a face-to-face
conversation. Although the point of this assignment was not to make
friends, I think it would've been nice to have that opportunity as
this was a communication class. The five people's blogs I commented
on are: Chau Chin Yo's, Brenda's, Rheon's, Jenna's, and Steph's.
I used to hate the idea that every
aspect of my life, including school, is slowly becoming more and more
integrated in the Web. But throughout the course of this semester, I
find that I'm dreading it less every time I surf the net. Even online
tasks that we never specifically practiced in class or lab have been
facilitated, as this class has taught me when professional language
is needed and how to incorporate it. For example, emailing a
professor. Although we never directly practiced this, we did do a
very similar exercise in lab where we made a practice cover letter to
send to a professional on Linkedin. Also, finding something on the
web has definitely been made easier. What's neat is that we weren't
necessarily given specific sites to find our information but instead,
we were taught a few ways to find multiple links to great sources or
peer-reviewed articles; we learned internet tricks that I never would
have thought of outside of this class like using Twitter, as I
mentioned earlier, to find links to other pages on a topic. During
the Wikipedia assignment, we learned that the references at the
bottom of the page can actually be very helpful links to more
in-depth information on the subject.With the help of this class,
accessing information online and communicating via social media has
become less of a burden and more of an effortless habit.
