Further Discussion Topic

A topic I would have like to cover more is chapter 9, Ethics and Moral Decision Making. We did not get to have a discussion on this chapter, and I feel this is one of the more important topics we should address. "Effective moral decision making depends on good critical-thinking skills, familiarity with basic moral values, and the motivating force of moral sentiments." I think moral decision making is a very important part of life. We make decisions everyday and we use our morals to help us make decisions. Many things affect our moral decisions such as friends, family, culture, and much more. Being able to not only make morally correct choices, but to reflect and critically analyze them it also important and promotes healthy growth. I feel this would have been a great topic for discussion because we all deal with this and it would have been nice to see what other people had on their mind.

Favorite, Least Favorite, Improvements

My favorite thing about this class is the fact that is online, and I am able to do my blog posts on my own time. This is good for me because I am a busy person and if it would have been very stressful for me to have an exact time everyday that I would have to do these blog posts. I feel like three blog posts a week is a very fair amount to do. It was not too overwhelming but also challenging enough because I would have to read each chapter earlier in the week and reflect on them through the blog posts. I also commenting on other people's posts because it promotes a healthy and critically analyzing community. The least favorite things about this class is meeting up with my group. It was very difficult to gather everyone's information and schedule so we could all make time in our day to meet up. We all have different times we are available, some have classes, some have work, others commute so it was a challenge to meet up to discuss projects. One thing that could be improved is on the Comm41 site, if there was a way to not have the "Older Posts." This way it was all on one page, and I would be able to Ctrl+F to find a specific key term or date, instead of looking through the archives. This would make things easier for the students as well as the teacher.

Learning over the semester

I have learned a lot of things over this semester, it is hard to talk about a specific few. I have learned about inductive and deductive arguments, analyzing, fallacies, language and communications and many more. One of my favorite things that I learned this semester is about marketing and advertising. I am a business major, and all businesses' main goal is to sell their product. This is done through effective marketing and advertising. I learned that many companies do marketing research, which is defined as "the process of identifying a target market for product or service..." In other words, companies research who will and will not buy their product and how to appeal to people so they will be influenced to purchase their product or service. Companies use surveys, observation, and experimentation to conduct their market research. Also, the use of symbols and images to represent a company. For example, Nike's swoosh, McDonald's golden arches, or Apple's apple logo. These are all associated with their respective company and when we see these images we are reminded about the company. After reading about this, I began to notice it more often and realized how much we are exposed to these images everyday.