Another reality check

So as many have pointed out, it's the last post of the semester. It's
also nearing the end of our time as groups, and nearing the end of the
semester. And for me, nearing the end to my second to last semester.

When you put all those things together the one that stands out is that
soon I'll be at my last semester at purdue. Scary thought. Up until
this point, it was just a different school to move on to. I feel this
will be the most significant change in my life for many years, and
I've known it was coming this entire time but I'm still not prepared
for it. And I feel that many people are in the same boat, especially
considering our economic situation.

So although this group will end, and this class will end, it is just
one of many things that will be ending to add up to saying "get the
heck out there and do something with your life," or as I would like it
to say "get the heck out there and make a difference." This time
there's no putting it off.

Signing off,
David Loverde

Ooohhhh man...the final week

This week coming up is essentially the final week for our group. We still have to finish our final presentation which will be given on Wednesday. Hopefully we can all get together tomorrow to work on the final presentation. Nothing new has happened since last week seeing that we have only had class once. Thanksgiving was good, hopefully it was for everyone else as well. Again though nothing has really been accomplished in terms of the final project, so there is a lot of work to be done. It really has seemed that time has really flown by. It seems like this final presentation along with other projects have really crept up on me and I'm sure on everyone else. It is really just hard to comprehend how we only have 3 more weeks of class left this semester.

Brandon

ah tis the time for the end of the semester...

So it's already that time of the semester where class work starts to pile on and everything seems like its due either this week or during dead week and in my case it stays true. But it's not so bad since it is almost Christmas break and then should hopefully be my final semester at Purdue pending on whether or not my senior design project passes this semester. Looking back at the semester, it seems that everything flew by even though at the time, I felt that time never passed and the end of the semester was never to come but being at this point of the year, I wish that it was still mid-semester so that I had more time to complete things thoroughly. On that list of completing things, I feel that our COM project could use more work on it before we present it this Wednesday but I'm sure that we will do fine and be able to give a good representation of how our service learning project went.

Chris Wall

The End is Near

Today is November 22nd. November. Already. I'm not quite sure where the time has gone, but yet another month in my senior year here at Purdue is almost at an end. There are so many emotions involved with this. Happiness. Sadness. Relief. Regret. It would make for an extremely long blog to list all the emotions that I'm feeling about my senior year and I doubt Jasmine would want to read that long of a blog.

I'm trying to take everything that happens this year moment-to-moment. So for this blog I am concentrating on the end of the service learning project/COM 320 as a whole. This class has been very interesting and has shown me a lot about myself, especially with how I work in groups. Now that it's the end of the semester I feel as if our group is more committed to the work at hand and in trying to get it done as soon as we can. This could be because the sooner we finish the project, the sooner we are done with class but that is beside the point. There were a few times this semester where we did not put as much effort into projects and assignments that we probably should have, but now I feel like we are exerting more than enough effort to finish this project. The project was fun, but I'm glad it's almost at an end. Assignments as time-consuming as this one has been are not my favorite thing in the world.

I am glad, however, that I have learned so much about myself and how I work in groups. I have learned that I am not very good at certain tasks while I am excellent at others. The group's feedback this past week helped with that. I have learned that I am too uptight with groups. I am disappointed when things do not go according to my plan and get a in a little over my head sometimes because I try to take on too much or expect too much. I have to give up some power to my other group members so the assignment at hand can end up better than if I was working by myself. What I am good at, however, are organizational tasks. I am good at taking notes and reminding group members of tasks that need to be accomplished as well as other things.

This semester has been interesting and more fun than I expected. And as the semester comes to an end, I am happy with my performance as well as my group's performance in the class.

Katie Spalding

Skipped a week...but not too much

The past two weeks have been somewhat laid back in class. We already conducted our creativity workshop the other week which went very well. The other groups had some good presentations as well, some were definitely better than others. Just this past week on the other hand we conducted leadership activities to define us as leaders. Not only did we find out our definitions but we also had to define our group members as well. Ironically two of group members were not present that day so the feedback that we received was less than stellar and not anonymous. We then conducted a few little activities where we all took turns reading questions off to the group and we had to all rate the person reading on that leadership trait that they read off. I don't think that this activity really did anything for me or anybody in my group. It really just got to be annoying having to read the questions and fill out all the papers for everyone. I understand the reasoning behind why we did this but don't feel it was necessary. We just started working on our final presentation outline for our service learning project. Tomorrow in class we intend to actually start working on the power point itself as well. Other than that nothing else has been going on in COM, other classes have been taking over. Will I graduate...the world may never know...


Brandon

Com news.

We are almost there! I can't believe thanksgiving is almost here and the semester is nearly over. It feels like it's been so long since we even did our service learning project and now we are to the final presentations for the class. It seems like we have passed the point of really learning new information in class, and are now just taking what we have learned/accomplished and showcasing it as this final project. Sitting in class on friday I was a little overwhelmed thinking about a presentation that would take the entire class period, but once the group started coming up with ideas and actually wrote some of the points down, I think it will be a quality report and don't think we will have any trouble meeting the time constraint.

Mitch Stamper

Driving Me Crazy

I have officially been out of school for over a week with H1N1 and a sinus infection. During this time, I have been quarantined to my bedroom at my house in Indianapolis. Let me tell you something: you don't realize how much you communicate with someone until you aren't allowed easy access to communication anymore. Being stuck alone in a room for 90% of a day can really drive a person insane. I tried to keep as busy as I could, with homework and such, but I never realized how much I communicated. I usually consider myself to be a quasi-quiet person that usually only voices an opinion when provoked. Well, I think I have found out that is not the truth. I need communication. Badly.

Anytime I left my room to communicate with the rest of my family (my mother and grandparents) I had to wear a surgical mask in order to make sure they were not infected with my sicknesses. That impeded conversations with my grandparents because they do not hear very well and the mask became annoying in all other conversations. The mask in this instance could be considered "noise" that interrupts smooth conversation. And boy did I get my fill of that "noise."

On the bright side, I am doing much better and about to come back to school, so conversation, here I come! I'll be back with a vengeance.

Katie Spalding

time for some fun

Well so far, I'm enjoying the creative group section of class, since it's a change of scenery from the usual "communication" theories. Don't get me wrong its fun and all to learn about those but having these creative activities in class is a good way to stimulate the creative side of the brain. The most recent creative workshop we had with the egg was something I did in high school but with different materials, but in this case they didn't restrict us on what materials could be used so we did utilize a pretty big loophole in their directions. We were still successful in achieving our goal of not having our "egg" break. With our creative workshop that our group will present, I hope that the other groups will come up with some interesting ideas and proposals for commercials and that I hope they enjoy our proposed workshop. Starting this week, I am looking forward to see what the other groups have come up with for their own workshop ideas.

Chris

November Already...

Its hard to believe its already November and the semester is almost over. At this point in class we have gotten down to doing just minor group activities. My last post I talked about the creativity workshop that will be going on, well now is that time. One group already went and they decided to have a form of "egg" drop problem that we all needed to solve in our groups. Just like that of high school physics problems. I thought it was a fun activity and at its core it really did show off groups creativity which was the goal. I think they could have had a little more substance. For example our group decided what we wanted to do and completed doing that about 2 minutes in; they gave us 20 minutes to complete. I just think they could have done something else to perhaps not have as much free time. All in all though it was pretty fun and I think that our design was the best, we could have gotten away with dropping our design off a building and it would be fine.

Now in terms of our own creativity workshop I discussed last time something that I wanted to do incorporating Rock band...obviously that didn't pull through. What we all did decide on though was a workshop where each group would receive a couple components and they have to construct a product and come up with a commercial for this product in a short period of time. The only stipulation that we have is that they do not create something that an individual part can already do by itself. I think it will be pretty fun and hopefully allow the creative juices to get flowing.


Brandon Nelson

Happy day after halloween!

Well lets get things started off by saying im glad that we are working with our original groups for the rest of the semester. Not that the crisis response group didn't work well, but I feel like after spending most of the semester in one group we have figured out how to work well together and understand each others strengths/weaknesses. Other new news, which isnt technically new but I may have missed last weeks blog, our service learning project with the boys and girls club was a big success. Even though a few of the activities didnt actually happen, the pumpkin carving which was the main event went very well and we managed to get 30 pumpkins cleaned and carved. A big thanks goes out to the volunteers that Dave brought and to Jasmine for helping out.

-Mitch Stamper

Swamped

Sometimes there is just so much going on that certain things get forgotten about. What I have come to realize, is that in general, group things are not among those things. During the last few weeks, I've fallen behind in some of my individual work, simply because of the lack of time. But due to others reliance on your work contributions, group work seems to take precedence over other things.

This brings up an intriguing idea: the possibility of using group work in a professional setting to increase the priority that the work has to the people in the group. While hard to measure, I think it is definitely something to look into.

Dave

whoops its been a while...

Well it's been 2 weeks since I've posted and that's my fault, so here's a recap of how the couple of weeks have been since I've already missed some postings. The topic that happened in the 2 weeks I would want to talk about that happened was our service project at the Boys and Girls Club of Lafayette. Well on October 22, our little pumpkin carving event was carried out at the boys and girls club, and looking back at that event, I personally felt it went smoothly even though we didn't get to carry out our original plan of doing a balloon popping game along with the carving. The reasoning for this was probably because the children came to the tables in waves instead of all at once and that a majority of the children had to leave once their pumpkin was done, therefore by the end of the event, which was around 5:45 or so, most of the children had already went home, so it was a bummer for us that we couldn't do more activities but also a somewhat relief because we had just enough pumpkins and no more children were wanting to carve one. We also had candy for the children which we did run out of, so telling some of them that we ran out was almost like telling them there was no Santa Claus cause of the facial expression they had when I told them we ran out. :(

With our service learning project done now, class has just been a myriad of small group activities circling around different issues, such as Problem Solving or Creativity. The problem solving groups were a new activity for me for at the same time, we had to either provide feedback for a selected person on their group communication skills or be the one who was being critiqued. When I had to provide feedback face-to-face, it was a first time experience having to do it in a classroom scenario, so I felt that I might've come off somewhat too relaxed than what I should've been and maybe been more assertive when it came to the "Constructive Criticism" section of the feedback. But I felt that the combination of the group task and feedback task was an interesting combination but truthfully felt that if I'm being graded on how I am in a group, I get conscious of how I'm acting and change my attitude which is not what I want but something I need to work on.

Chris

Technologically Challenged

This blog isn't going to have much to do with COM320 today. I simply need to vent.

Today my laptop quit working. The monitor went dark and fuzzy and I couldn't see much of anything that popped up. I tried to fix it, but to no avail. I had no idea what I was doing anyway.

A week and a half ago or so I got a new phone and I'm still having trouble using it. The keyboard is too small, there are too many options to scroll through, and when I want to text I end up going to the Internet every time. I'm still not sure why.

This whole blog thing is still pretty new to me as well. Don't get me wrong, I like it. It's just...new. I haven't quite caught on to navigating through the different blogs I have set up.

I guess to sum all of this up I would have to say that I am, sadly enough, extremely technologically challenged.

I wish I knew more about technology. Then maybe when things stopped working on me, I would have some sort of an inkling of how to handle it. As it is now, my solution is to stare blankly at the screen and hope that it fixes itself. (I do not recommend this solution; it tends not to work.) I am the dumbest member of this generation that I know of when it comes to technology. Like I said, I'm still trying to get used to my cell phone. I don't know how to navigate through the options and it took me two whole days to find the alarm clock. Very sad.

Knowing all of this, it makes me wonder...why do I bother? Why must I always deal with technology? I miss the good old days before cell phones and laptops. Before blogging and T9. Back when people talked more often face-to-face than through mediated forms. But I guess it's a must that we learn about and use technology nowadays. As much as I dislike it, I have no choice but to suck it up and deal with it. And it's only going to get more difficult for me as time passes. Everyday people are creating more technologies than I even care to know about. I'm just hoping I can catch up on the technological craze sometime. Hopefully soon. Very soon.


Katie Spalding

Well thats that...

Now that our event has been completed a lot of stress has been relieved from not only just me but the entire group. As Katie mentioned in her last blog post not everything went exactly according to plan but in the end everything did go rather smoothly and it turned out to be pretty fun. Now that that is all over with we have been working in other small groups on different little workshops. The last one was about Crisis control which was interesting to discuss in our group. Most of B&G Clubbers was in my group so that was nice but the event in general was something that I really do not have that much experience in which showed in our discussion of how to resolve the problem. Our crisis was about the JetBlue incident and I personally have never flown before so really do not understand how all of the terminal things work in an airport so in terms of solutions I was not very useful even though I still tried to contribute a lot.

The night of our service learning project I did not feel well at all and it just got worse on Friday which was our day to present our Crisis Case. I decided it was a better idea to miss class and the presentation rather than to go in and risk infecting others; which was a good idea since soon after my roommate got ill as well.

The next workshop involves us promoting creativity. I really have no clue as to what I want to propose to my new group in terms of doing something to promote creativity. Hopefully our options are pretty broad cause I would just like to do something fun and abstract. I'm kind of trying to find a way to incorporate RockBand into our creativity because I would have no problem bringing all of my stuff in to play in class haha.

Anyway since the service learning project is over all we have are these little group activities and then our final project presentation to look forward to, so the class is settling down now.

Brandon