How much of your day do you spend communicating? How important is communication for your day to day success in personal and professional dealings? How does the channel of communication influence the way you encode and decode messages? These are the questions that we will deal with after reading Chapter One.

What are some of your personal and academic interests? Our goal with this posting is to get to know one another and find out what we share in common with one another.

It will also be an opportunity to try out using our class bulletin board on Blackboard. To get to Blackboard, use the button that says Blackboard at the top of this page. You will then see a dialogue box. In that box place your user name and your password.

Once you are on Blackboard, review the announcements page with which Blackboard will always open. There, you will find some further instructions that guide you through the process of making your first posting.

Once you are in the Blackboard discussion area, note how you can choose one of the threads. Each of the active threads for a topic area will be visible to you and identified by its topic number representing which of the forum topics we are discussing.

If you click on the subject line you will be able to see the message that has been posted.

You will also see a list of the participants who have made entries in that topic. If you click on the name of the person who submitted a posting, this will open your email client so that you can send them a private email message. Usually, you will want to reply to messages in the Discussion Board itself so that others can partake of the conversation.

You can reply to that message, or hit the back button on your browser you can use the Start a New Thread option.

When making your initial postings to a topic area on the Discussion Board, it would be best to use the new thread choice. Differentiate your feedback to others by using the Reply option.

Always be sure to identify what topic you are addressing in the subject line of your message.

As noted in the syllabus, grading for the forum topics will be allocated as follows: two points for your initial posting on each topic and two points for your feedback to others per topic. Your feedback takes the form of offering responses to at least two messages submitted by other class members, and then following up later in the module to reply to something someone else has said in response to you, or by participating in on ongoing thread in which two or more other people are participating.

The time that you post is also very important. As a dialogue among class members, there are specified windows of time during which you ought to do the postings. These are detailed in the class timeline. You can find the class timeline by using its button at the top of any page in the site.

The length of an initial posting for each posting ought to be about one screen. For most postings you should also use some of the key terms that are listed for the topic.( See topics 2 and 3 for a listing of key words).

Reply postings to offer feedback ought to include a summary of the key points made by the original poster to which you are responding. Do not simply cut and paste. (Your reply post will automatically include the whole of the original to which you are responding.) Part of the learning experience is mastering the skill of accurately paraphrasing what the other person has said.

In Chapter One, Seiler and Beall define various contexts of communication. As you read it, think about the range of daily communication situations that you experience using some of the terms from the chapter that are listed in the box to your right.

Which of these contexts of communication do you enter into most frequently in a given week? Interpersonal, dyadic, interviewing, small group interaction as a member of a team, or public speaking to a larger group of people in a more formal setting?

In which of these contexts of communication do you feel the most comfortable and successful? And, insofar as success often depends on the environment and who it is that is communicating with you, provide examples of situations in which you are most successful.

context of communication
interpersonal communication
interview
small group communication
public communication
environment

For this topic, I will pose a hypothetical situation that we can explore to examine the importance of the medium of communication.

Suppose that you are experiencing a serious conflict with a best friend. I would further invite you to think of a real friend. Suppose additionally that the friendship is valuable to you and thus you want to resolve the issue in conflict. You've decided that it is incumbent upon you to take the first step. You feel that you need to initiate a
dialogue about the problem as you see it and get things out on the table so that you can discuss it. You weigh three choices, any of which is something you could easily do:

You write a letter or buy a nice card in which you lay out what you think are the dimensions of the problem and indicate your desire to deal with the issues.

You call your friend up on the phone and discuss the dimensions of the problem indicating that you want to deal with the issues.

You drive across town to their house and sit
down face to face to talk about the dimensions of the problem and indicate that you want to deal with the issues.

Which option would you choose? Why? What aspect of the channel of communication that you chose would enhance your chances of achieving your communication goal?

 

In your answer, you may also explain (though you need not go into a great deal of detail about a particular situation) why the channel of communication you would select would be best in light of the type of interpersonal relationship you have with your friend and factors such as the environment or context of communication. Use the key terms to use for your answer that are listed in the column on your right.