Final Blog (COMM 302)

When looking back on the past semester of COMM 302 I realize that 16 weeks flies by. I really didn’t know what to expect at the beginning of this semester. By now, being a senior, I’ve had all kinds of classes, some good and some bad. In all I thought this was a great class and learning experience.

After reading through the schedule at the beginning of the semester I was like “ummmm ok ePortfolio, interesting.” I didn’t know what to expect because I have never had done an ePortfolio. After browsing around on the Wix page I felt comfortable doing this. To me it was more like a web design page then anything.

The ePortfolio assignments taught me that being creative can draw viewers to your page. Sometimes it’s not about all the accomplishments that you have on your resume. Drawing in people with a testimony or with the layout of the page can make just as big of an impression as a nice resume.

By keeping my ePortfolio updated it will help keep my work resume updated as well, which in the future will help me better prepare for possible promotion with my current company. I can constantly add projects to my ePortfolio. I’m always doing projects at work and keeping a document of them on my ePortfolio will definitely benefit me in the future.

Now when it comes to the main project I feel like I could’ve taken a different approach on it. After viewing the five presentations and doing the feedback surveys I had a light bulb go off in my head and thought of different ideas. For some reason I couldn’t get the cyberbullying idea out of my head and stuck with it. I wish I would’ve been a little more opened minded when it came to my main idea for the research paper. Besides my statistics class this was the only other paper I had like this. I really don’t do these types of research papers a lot, but it was good practice. Another problem I had was with the method. It took me forever to figure out what I wanted to do and how I was going to do it. I wasn’t sure if a survey was the right way to go, however I decided on it because I fell like it would be easy to relate to when it came for presentation time.

In all my experience with this paper was pretty good. I learned a lot more about during research and using scholarly sources than ever before. I wish I had an example of a past paper to examine so I knew exactly what to do, but hey trial and error works too. Breaking down this paper in parts was a good idea. I didn’t know where it was going until the end. I think I have a good grasp on this way if I had to do it again. The most valuable thing that came out of this project was two things one using the ODU database to save my research in a folder, this was a life saver, and two having to write about a topic that was hard to deal with. What I mean by that is making cyberbullying into a positive, which positive was the theme this semester. Turning a negative into a positive was a challenge, but it makes my writing skills stronger for the future.