Reflecting on ALES 204

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.