“Students will enhance their capacity to communicate in various ways—writing, graphics, numeracy, and other visual and oral means—to collaborate effectively with others in group work, and to be competent in appropriate communication technologies.”
The first of four University Studies goals is Communication. This goal is stating that an array of forms to display information allows for a stronger portrayal of information. The purpose of this goal is to broaden ones ability to represent information in various forms of media. Information can be displayed in various forms, and each form can have its own effect on how it is perceived.
Throughout the term we completed many pieces of work that would fall under the goal of Communication, but no assignment better fits here than the creative piece from the Exploration paper. Without the use of any words, my creative component speaks volumes. The body is cut out of cardboard to symbolize me. The colors of the Iranian flag are collaged on my body. In front of my heart sits the emblem that is found on the current flag of Iran. It clearly communicates who I really am and how close my country is to my heart. This assignment effectively showed me how much my culture effects who I am regardless of the fact that I was born and raised in Oregon. My culture lies deep within my skin and will continue to be a strong status of mine.
I was proud of the end result of my creative piece after working diligently for hours on it. The assignment took far longer than I expected but the hard work paid off. I am not an artist by any means, but my creativity was released in putting together a uniform work of art. Drawing the emblem in front of my heart was the most difficult aspect of my Creative Component. If one were to look at how well it was drawn in, they would think I traced it somehow. The ironic thing is that although I am not an artist, I did it free hand by looking at the flag and drawing what I saw. Their were two things I wish I had done better, but making these improvements doesn’t take away from how well my piece communicates its message. The image of the body itself was the area in which improvement could have been made. If I could go back, I would have had a bigger piece of cardboard to work with and I would have had someone trace my entire body on it. This would should that from head to toe I am Iranian more visually, but the message is clear with a smaller section of my body, too. The image over my heart could have been done with construction paper to stay more consistent with the layout of the flag, but that doesn’t take away from the message once again.
Just as in the previous example, the scheduling assignment reflected many things without the use of many words. This is made possible through the use of communication. The communication goal pushes the idea that there are many forms of displaying information, and in the scheduling assignment, I effectively used graphs to portray my predicted schedule and actual schedule in a given week. The used bar graphs and also pie graphs to display the information effectively. The bar graphs assisted in representing the data in comparison, while the pie graphs broke the information down into pieces that could easily be interpreted.
In completing the assignment, I was able to clearly see that I am very good at scheduling. This is an important task and is not only helpful right now, but will be a vital skill as I get older. The most interesting aspect of the graphs was the pie graph that is titled “Breakdown of Actual Hours Spent in Chunk Categories”. In my day to day activities, I had never thought about how much time I spend doing things I need to be doing, want to be doing, and finally the time I spend sleeping. I had a very equal balance between all three categories. I think it is good that I sleep and do things that I need to be doing by a slight percentage over what I want to be doing! Displaying the information the way I did clearly demonstrated my ability to organize information in a manner that is easy to follow. I really do not see anyway that the information could have been communicated any more easily, but if I could go back I would add another graph that just focused on my job at Best Buy and what I do there. This would be interesting graph that broke down my responsibilities at work and how much time I spend doing each activity on a given day.
