Senior Seminar E-Portfolio
Communication Department
Charlie Campbell
UW Parkside
Learning Goal: Identity
For the identity learning goal, I believe that talking about all of the different types of communication is an important term to learn. Identity is explained as, “performing excellent written, oral, and nonverbal communication interpersonally and professionally, in order to strengthen their ability to understand self and others.” I believe that every one of the communication types are very important, and are all used more than we think.
Throughout my communication classes, we learned about written, oral, and nonverbal communication over and over again. I believe it is very important to learn about and build skills around all three of them. I learned about written communication by working on research papers, research proposals, discussion boards and other types of written work. I learned about oral communication by presenting in front of classes, performing poems or skits in front of people, and working in many groups or teams to complete assignments. I learned about nonverbal communication by studying symbols, body language, and other non-verbal and non-written cues.
An artifact I would like to choose for the identity learning goal would be from COMM 350, titled “Digital Storytelling.” The main assignment for this class was to create a three minute long promotion video explaining an on-campus job here at UW Parkside, which will be my Identity artifact. My group members and I had to select a campus student worker and conduct a video interview with them about their job to promote it. Throughout the process of this project, I used written, oral, and nonverbal communication many times. I used written communication when emailing my professor and my student worker, writing out a full script for the interview, and writing notes and slides for the final video product. I used oral communication when verbally communicating with my professors and group mates, as well as conducting the interview in its entirety. I used nonverbal communication when deciding what clips from the interview to integrate in the video, as well as using slide cards and images in the video to create direction and a story.
The identity learning goal can be used in the sports media field every single day. You have to use all types of oral, written, and nonverbal communication in the sports media field. You can use written communication by writing blogs or scripts to produce TV or radio shows. You can use oral communication when speaking on the radio or TV shows, as well as talking amongst your colleagues or clients. You also use nonverbal communication by using signals or signs when on the air to direct the show.
I will use this learning goal in the future because my skills have been sharpened in the three forms of communication, making my work in sports media much easier and smoother. I will perform much better in all aspects of my sports media job because I have had lots of learning and experience with written, oral, and nonverbal communication.
Learning Goal: Knowledge
For the knowledge portion of my portfolio, I will be choosing understanding cognitive frames as my key terms of the learning goal. I believe that this key term helps with identifying information, and pairing that with your knowledge to show your skills and what you know. Per the UW Parkside knowledge learning goal, information is facts, statistics, testimonies, and anecdotes. information can be researched or taken from data resources, and need to be reliable and verifiable. Using these bass lines of what information is, knowledge is applying information toward a purpose, putting data into a use for context, or building upon prior understandings and ideological premises.
The theory or concept that I learned from a communications class that relates to the learning goal of understanding cognitive frames, is the 7 C’s of Public Relations. The 7 C’s of Public Relations is one of the most important concepts in the field. These descriptions are basically rules to live by while making posts or statements in the Public Relations field. The 7 C’s are clear, concise, concrete, correct, coherent, complete, and courteous. I relate this concept to the key term of the knowledge learning goal because your information has to be correct and truthful in Public Relations, which goes perfectly with the information portion of the Understanding Cognitive Frames learning goal. A big part of the learning goal is using facts, statistics, testimonies, and anecdotes that can be researched, or are data resources that are reliable and verifiable, which correlates to a few of the “C’s” of the 7 C’s of Public Relation.
Understanding cognitive frames is a term that I can remember using in a class that I had in the fall semester of 2024 called “Public Relations Concepts and Practices.” In this class, we studied all about the field of public relations, and had multiple projects throughout the class that involved research, including a presentation project about a public relations failure. The concept of this project was to research public relations mishaps that happened to major companies and explain what went wrong and how they could fix their public image. For this project, my partner and I chose to present on the Boeing public relations mishap, where they handled their response to an aircraft door that flew off during the flight, causing lots of worry amongst the passengers. We used facts, statistics, testimonies, and anecdotes in our presentation to show accuracy and validity. This information is reliable because we got the information from Boeing's website and from several verified social media accounts. In our presentation, we used quantitative data to showcase how many mishaps Boeing had had prior to that incident, as well as the number of people on board the aircraft. When using our knowledge that we gain from researching the topic, we successfully applied information towards a purpose, we put data into useful context for the audience, and we built upon prior understanding about the topic with the research to create a powerful overall product.
One of my dream jobs is to be a sideline reporter for a Major League Baseball team. their job is solely based on research and facts. When they report on TV about a player during the game, most of the information is from statistical research or conducting their own interviews with the players before the game. The gathering of information and using prior knowledge is a major part of their job, and is important for the fans to know that that source is reliable and verifiable.
The relevance of the information portion of the knowledge learning goal is that being truthful, reliable, and verifiable is a very important skill to have in any profession. Having the trust of your peers within the workplace is one of the biggest compliments as an employee that you can have, and will make sure that business goes off as smoothly as possible.
Learning Goal: Messages
A key term of the Messages learning goal is Semiotics. Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols, and signification. Semiotics can also be explained as the study of how our meaning is created, not what the meaning is.
A concept that I learned in a communication class was about body language within the workplace. Body language is one of the most important symbols in job interviews, meetings, or any situation in the workplace really. Body language is a symbol of what you are thinking most of the time. If you are in a meeting and you think an idea is dumb, most of the time you can tell if someone thinks it's dumb by the way their body is. Rolling your eyes, an annoyed sigh, or a shrug of the shoulders, are all symbols that can give away your thoughts on a situation by just looking at your body language.
I remember learning about nonverbal communications a lot in a class called Communication and the Human Condition, where we spent a couple of weeks learning about types nonverbal communication, and its characteristics. There were a few assignments that we had to complete which involved researching in the textbook about nonverbal communication, and I believe body language is a great example of nonverbal communication, along with your basic examples. A direct quote from my submission reads, “The type of nonverbal communication that I am going to focus on, is postures and gestures. I believe that this is the most common type of nonverbal communication because if you are trying to tell somebody something or get a message across, you use gestures all the time. Using nonverbal gestures happens very often, going unnoticed most of the time. Something as simple as a hand wave to your friend or pointing a finger and talking about somebody is a nonverbal gesture. We even have nonverbal gestures in sports when calling plays or getting a signal from a referee. Nonverbal cues are everywhere.” Body language is a great example of a nonverbal gesture, because you express emotion without talking. I believe that this goes hand-in-hand with semiotics because body language is a symbol that could be interpreted into something meaningful.
Body language is a crucial part of making a good first impression when doing job interviews, or meeting coworkers for the first time. employers and bosses are always looking at body language as a symbol to gauge you on. Going into a job interview, having good body language and posture can set you off on a good foot by making you look intrigued and interested in the job you're interviewing for. employers are looking for signs other than what you are telling them that would make them think that you would be a good fit for the role, and having good body language is a good sign to them.
The relevance of this learning goal will help me in the future professionally by making a good first impression and job interviews. Along with a good résumé, good verbal skills, and a good mindset, good body language is something that all employers look for, so making your body language a key symbol of yourself will be very crucial in the job interviewing process.
Learning Goal: Roles
A key term of the roles learning goal is Coordinated Management of Meeting, or CMM. Coordinated Management of Meeting explains how we develop rules for appropriate actions/ reactions in a social situation.
In Comm 322 titled Public Relations Concepts and Practices, we learned about managing relationships, which has an aspect of the roles learning goal in it. This relates to the learning goal because you have to play different roles in all aspects of life, and those roles are mainly managing relationships. Whether it's at home, with friends, at work, etc, we all have different roles and relationships that we have to manage. At home, I play the role of a son, a brother, a pet owner. On the baseball field, I play the role of an athlete, leader and mentor, friend and many more. The components of managing relationships are trust, control mutuality, commitment, and satisfaction. I believe that managing relationships is very comparable to roles in a sense that we have to change our mindset and actions for different roles, like we do with relationships.
A great example of a piece of work that I have done that relates to the Roles learning goal is a CBL project that I was a part of for Comm 435 Integrated Marketing Communication called “IMC Project.” This project was a group project with 6 other classmates where we had to create a full marketing campaign for a non-profit organization called Our Harmony Club. Our Harmony Club serves as a day-care facility for people with Alzheimers and Dementia. Our Harmony Club was in dire need of a marketing revamp, so it was up to the class to make marketing campaigns to help them get more volunteers. I played a few roles in this project for my group. I played the role of communicator, website maker, and just a contributing teammate. My role as a communicator was an important one. The communication aspect involved me talking with my teammates and talking with the staff at Our Harmony Club, working through potential ideas to implement in our marketing strategy. Maybe the biggest role I played in the marketing campaign was website creator. I have prior experience with making websites, as I have one of my own for my sports media portfolio, so I offered to re-create Our Harmony Club’s website because it needed some major updates. The last major role I played was a leader and teammate. This project really made me focus on different roles within the same task, which I think is very valuable.
I believe that there are many different roles in sports media. You have to work with a media team, so playing the role of a teammate will be very important. Another role I will have is being a writer or producer of sports media content, and I could also play the role of being an online or television personality if I choose to go into broadcasting or sideline reporting. Working in sports media can have many different jobs and roles, so being able to adapt to them and also be multiple roles at one time is very important.
I will use what I learned about the roles learning goal to help me stay focused on different tasks in the future. People are constantly playing many roles in their lives, within the organization and their family, so being able to stay focused on playing multiple roles at once will be very important in your family life and your corporate life.
Learning Goal: Diversity
Intersectionality is the interplay of social categories that create the conditions of our social lives. Intersectionality also explains that no single label can fully explain someone's identity, perceptions, behaviors, etc.
In my class titled Communication and Ethnicity, we talked a lot about diversity and how different types of people from all different backgrounds but specifically Latino backgrounds and how they had to live from the early 1900s up until now. This course really taught me a lot about diversity because we read many stories and poems about people's experiences growing up in places like Mexico and Puerto Rico, and then trying to move to America to make more money for their families back home. One very specific topic that I remember being intrigued by was motherhood. The topic of motherhood in this context was very interesting because there were many decisions to be made by mothers in the Latino countries during that time. Lots of mothers had to decide if they wanted to move to the states with their husband and children when the husband went to America for work, or whether to stay back in their home country while her husband was in America alone making money for them. There was a fine line of what to do and what not to do at that time, so that made the decision for these mothers very hard. They had to be mentally and emotionally strong for their families, whether it was leaving their immediate families back home, or staying home while their husband went to America to work.
My example of class work that relates to a learning goal of diversity was in that same class that I previously mentioned called the Communication and Ethnicity. We had a lot of activities in that class that really made us feel out these stories and poems about the struggles of Latino people at that time, and this particular assignment we had to read a poem and act them out in front of the class in groups. My group's poem was a poem about a mother of two kids that had a husband as well, that was going back-and-forth with her mother deciding on whether she should go to the United States with her husband for work, or to stay home with her children and stay close to her family. This poem had many heated arguments between the mother of two and her mother, going back and forth about what she should do. acting out this poem really made me feel like I was in the moment, it made me realize how different of a lifestyle they had to have than other people, especially to an American person. Most Americans didn't have to grow up wondering if their family had to move away for work to be able to support themselves, yet that was reality for a lot of people in the Latino countries. This assignment relates directly to the diversity learning goal by putting myself in the shoes of a person from a very different culture and timeframe than what I know nowadays. Reading about what they had to go through and the hard family decisions they had to make really put it into perspective how different everybody in this world is.
Diversity can be a very important piece in a career setting because diversity within an organization creates ideas from people with many different backgrounds. New creative ideas come up because of the vast difference of how people grew up and what their culture was growing up, which creates great ideas from many different angles. Being accepting and open to new ideas from people of all walks of life can really lead to some advanced conversations that result in great new products and ideas within a workforce.
Learning Goal: Research
The learning goal of research is defined as, “asking and answering meaningful questions using multiple methods and rigorous criteria.” There are three examples of communication methodologies used in research, and those are quantitative, qualitative and auto/ethnographic, and rhetoric and critical culture. The learning goal also explains the criteria for “good” research. A “good” research question should be clear, focused, and advance a unique argument. A “good” secondary research is methodologically sound, accurate, recent, and the purpose it was conducted is transparent. A “good” method is the one that supports your specific research question. And “good” research is ethical, has value, is scientifically valid, reflects fair subject selection, and shows respect for subjects.
When thinking of a theory or concept that I learned from a communications class that relates to the research learning goal, the first class I thought about was COMM 207, Introduction to the Communication Discipline. This class mainly focused on the ins and outs of research, so there were a lot of theories and concepts that I learned from this course. A very basic but also very important theory is social construction. Social construction is when people co-create through communicative interaction, the realities and beliefs about ideas, practices, and their value. In simple words, all things in society are made from social construction. The way we dress, the food we eat, the TV shows we watch, those are all socially constructed based on values, norms, and trends.
An example of class work that I will be using is a research proposal that I did in COMM 207, Introduction to the Communication Discipline. This was a research proposal that could be done on any topic, and my love for professional sports and baseball, I chose the topic of, “Are professional athletes overpaid?” I believe that this topic could result in some very interesting research findings, especially when searching the web, interviewing people, and sending out surveys to collect data, which is qualitative and quantitative data. This research proposal had me dive deep into many different subtopics of my main topic. I researched articles from intelligent published writers to get their opinion on the topic to gain further knowledge which would help me create questions for my interviews and my surveys to get the best resource possible. I planned on surveying my teammates and other friends that are into sports, as well as people that are not into sports questions about the pay of professional athletes. This project was by far the most fun I've had researching in my career. Researching articles from knowledgeable professionals widened my view on this topic, and provided me with great data to use and created interview questions and surveys to get an answer for my topic. I collected qualitative and quantitative data in the process, and used that towards producing a great research proposal that, if followed through with, would give us a direct answer to the question of, “Are professional athletes overpaid?”
A professional or work related connection to the research learning goal could be as simple as doing more research on sports. My desire to work in the sports media field goes hand-in-hand with researching topics such as the one I used in my project from COMM 207. Using qualitative and quantitative data to create research questions to implement in interviews and surveys will be extremely helpful in my sports media career when making my own articles or blog posts.
I believe I will use the research skills that I have learned in the communications department very frequently in my job in sports media. I look forward to continuing to sharpen my skills when researching about professional sports, and hopefully getting better at it to further improve the product that I put out to the world.
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