Reflective Blog Post - ALES 204 Comes to an end

ALES 204 comes to an end today, and I certainly can't sum up the initiatives of the course better than 3 awesome students did with their video presentation in our last class this morning. It looks like they put a lot of effort into that video, so good job Kelsey, Annalise, and Julianna!
Our fall term ALES 204 communication class was the first to heavily incorporate social media into the curriculum. The class took on a very modernized view, and students were given a thorough introduction to the new forms of communication which are quickly becoming the norm. This included an introduction to websites and tools including Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, GoogleDocs, and much much more. We were given assignments based on these forms of social media as a source of practice for their use.

Some of the social media we used
Received December 7th, 2011 from this blog

Since our ALES 204 class took such a modernized perspective, you can expect that much of class and lab time was spent with computers. Most students came to class armed with a laptop, and as a student without neither a laptop nor a smartphone, I felt that the lectures were not as effective for me. Participation marks were granted based on tweets and blog posts, and students were given ample time to complete these tweets in class. Having to save my thoughts and complete the tweets after a day of classes often broke the ebb and flow of the course for me.
For this reason, the lab was my favorite aspect of our ALES 204 class this term. When students had to use computers in the lab; we had access to plenty in the lab classrooms, and it felt more natural for me to complete both the individual and group work in that environment. I also enjoyed the lab assignments, since they did a good job of focusing on the kinds of communication that one might encounter in real life. Examples of lab assignments which I feel I got the most out of include the mock job interview and the impromptu presentations.
Overall, I am glad to have completed ALES 204: getting practice with citation, journalistic examination, and  the newest forms of social media have left me better prepared to tackle the fast evolving forms of human communication.