Favorite Concept

My favorite concept that we learned from the book was how to refute arguments.  I feel like this was by far the most applicable to my life and also it came up a lot in our final project.  This is when I could really see how forming arguments was important, but refuting them was equally important, especially in our mock business world setup.  In making decisions such as who to hire, being able to consider what someone says and then think of the pros and cons logically and be able to weigh them out loud in an argument is an extreme advantage.  The individuals participating in our group who were more skilled at it than others stood out tremendously and seemed to me to be most likely to actually be in a position of power like we set up at a meeting, being able to decide who to hire and not hire.  I hope this skill in particular will take me far in whatever line of work I end up going into. 

Favorite and Least Favorite Things about the Class

My favorite thing about this class was learning how to blog.  Even though my grandparents like to joke about how my generation blogs and “tweets” about everything, I happen to very technologically challenged and I have never even seen a blog before, much less write one.  I was surprised how easy it was for even me to figure out, it actually did not detract from my learning at all like I thought it would.  My least favorite part of the course was sometimes the content seemed a little repetitive or obvious, and even though I liked the focus it had I would have preferred something either a little faster paced or a little bit harder to understand.  All in all this class was nice and was a good experience for my first online class, because the fact that it was online did not detract from my learning experience one bit. 

What I learned

In this class I have learned how to get my point across in the most educated, meaningful way possible.  Someone once told me that it doesn’t matter how smart you are and how many good ideas you may have if you do not have the skills to present them in a positive way to people.  The communication skills in this class are unique because they are not just tailored to getting you through speeches in college or other things that seemed to be a trend in other communication classes; they are applicable to everyday life and also going to be very applicable to everyday life in the work force in all of our futures.  Working in groups, knowing how to argue in the most understandable and convincing way, and being able to come to a conclusion by stating premises that help build your point are just some examples of the major ideas that we learned in this course that I learned that really stuck with me.