Breakdown of Communication in the Communication Department

I'm not going to lie, this was supposed to be the best Spring Break ever. Emphasis on the supposed. Wednesday I was supposed to get on a flight, with some of my best friends, to Portland, OR to compete at my first ever Pi Kappa Delta nationals tournament. Unfourtunately, the day before we are scheduled to take off, the coach calls me and tells me I can't go. Not because of grades, not because I'm not good enough. No, because he can't tell the two Samanthas in my class apart and put my best friend's last name on my ticket. So here I am... Sitting at home after working my butt off for two days so I could eat while we were on this trip that I'd been waiting for all year. Yeah, life and reality have a way of rearing their ugly heads sometimes.

Though all is not lost, the money I made over the weekend went to something that I had been wanting for a really long time, a 32GB iPod Touch. It's not as great as going to Portland, but an iPod is more useful and will last me longer than that trip. Even if I did miss out on some very valuable experience and networking opportunities. I had planned to introduce myself to the coaches of the schools I plan on applying to next year, but now I'll have to find another way.

Let's Talk About Show and Tell!

So I originally thought about presenting my Prezi to the class, but after thinking it over, and finding out that I would need to present it a second time, I've decided to leave all my presenting for the last date. I feel like this would be the best way to go about it considering the types of all of my projects. There is a slight disadvantage of not presenting this time because I think it couldn’t hurt my project any.

However, the advantage of not presenting this time around is that the class won't have to sit through my Prezi twice. I know that my portfolio presentation will be fairly long though. My first artifact could use a little presentation, my second can stand fairly on it's own, but my third artifact has to be presented to the class. There is no way around it since my third artifact is a speech.

I may end up slightly adapting my Prezi to make it a little easier to present since I hate it when people read directly from a screen and I want the class to stay involved. To present my second artifact I'm going to have to get creative as a brochure is one of those projects that it's hard to actually present. I think, I'll introduce the brochure, explain what it is about, where I would put it and the purpose of the brochure, but actually do most of the presenting through my third artifact.

At this point, I think my plan fits my artifacts very well and I am definitely looking forward to completing artifacts two and three and then presenting them all.

One Down, Two to Go

If I thought coming up with an idea for Artifact 1 was difficult, I hit a brick wall for Artifact #2. I know that I want something with a little more writing than my Prezi, but not as much straight writing as my third artifact. I really liked the idea of a brochure, but I'm not exactly sure what information I would want to put on that. I think I'm going to take a more scientific approach to this artifact. I want to look at how the scientists are saying that social networking is affecting our society. I think the brochure would be a great way to break up the larger chunks of information into readable and interesting sections. I'm leaning more towards creating more than one brochure. Possibly one aimed at school counselors and one aimed at their students. The one aimed towards counselors could have more of a technical feel because the counselors would be more education in that specific field. The second brochure will need to be interesting enough to engage a high school teenager and inform them of what social networking is doing. I’ve thought about briefly mentioning the fairly new idea of being addicted to the internet or video games as well as the new type of arthritis that is nicknamed Gamer’s Thumb. Doing this would inform the student that the decisions they are making now could ultimately affect the way they live in the future. The goal of the brochures won’t be to encourage students to delete their Facebook accounts, but more to monitor how much they are using these services.