Miscommunication

Despite my lack of real-world work experience, I have noticed a couple of instances of miscommunication, and the results that arose from them. The most notable situation that I can think of occurred last year in a school organization to which I belong. Basically, a person in charge sent out an email informing the members of the group that we would be conducting a fund-raiser the next week. The email was sent late in the week on Friday, and there was some confusion as to which week the person was referring to. Some people thought he actually meant two weeks from when it was sent. Most people were aware of when the event was scheduled but the confusion caused us to have fewer workers than we had anticipated. This led to an increased workload for those of us that made it to the event.

The simplest way that this miscommunication could have been prevented would have been for the person to have included the actual dates of the fundraiser in the email. This would have ensured there was no confusion concerning when the event was going to occur. I think a lot of times miscommunication results from people just assuming that everyone knows what they are talking about, instead of making sure they are giving complete and precise information.

I'm on a Blog

I really enjoyed Jesse's presentation about simple car repairs that I could do. One reason this presentation was interesting to me was that I have no knowledge of cars or car maintenance. Also, it is such a necessary topic to have at least a basic understanding of that I felt it might be extremely useful in the future. He also collected a number of good detailed pictures showing the parts of the car that were being worked on and mentioned some very basic but useful tips that would make car maintenance possible even for somebody with as little knowledge as myself.

As far as my prior knowledge of online portfolios goes, I have none. I have not started making mine for the university nor have I been required to put one together for a class. I haven't had a class that taught the mechanics of making one, so hopefully we can have a pretty detailed explanation or instructions to follow so I know what is going on.

Presentations

I was very impressed with all the PowerPoint presentations over the past couple of weeks. I enjoyed seeing the creativity and variety of interest of everyone in the class. However, I am supposed to only talk about three in particular so I will be discussing the presentations on Rajon Rondo, fishing, and the high school basketball competition in Pennsylvania.

I was intrigued by Jeffery's presentation on Rajon Rondo for two reasons: one, I consider myself a sports fan; and two, I consider myself a Kentucky Basketball hater. The second reason is what created my negative attitude towards Rondo in the first place. Jeffery had a couple of youtube videos that highlighted Rondo's playing ability and community service. I thought his presentation was effective in projecting Rondo in a positive light. His use of highlight videos and statistics persuaded me that Rajon Rondo my not be as bad as I had once believed.

What caught my attention about the saltwater fishing was the numerous incredible pictures of enormous fish and beautiful oceans. Fishing is certainly a topic that I claim no knowledge of, so the whole presentation was very informative to me. If you had told me some of the fish caught in the pictures were of record-breaking size, I'd have believed it. But to have a handout with actual record sizes and compare those to the fish in the pictures was fascinating.

Then there was the presentation on Inter-AC league basketball. Again another topic involving sports that I was completely clueless about. The presentation was very informative and convinced me that this was the premiere conference for high school basketball competition. Of course, there doesn't need to be much convincing with a list of players that distinct. To have three solid Division 1 basketball players in the same high school division is extremely impressive. Well, Inter-Ac had that plus Gerald Henderson, Wayne Ellington, and Sean Singletary. That's incredible.

Anyway, as I said all of the presentations have been great and I look forward to seeing the remaining ones tomorrow (or hopefully Wednesday, yay snow!!)