Amanda's ENC 6421 Journal

I need to look over the Engineering Innovation Proposals for Communications for Engineers. I can't assign grades but I can provide comments and suggest areas for improvement. The last five groups' presentations were outstanding. The PowerPoint presentations were very sophisticated and all the groups were prepared. All the groups answered questions with ease even when their classmates asked difficult questions. Their next assignment is the final copy of the campus directions assignment. Earlier in the semester the groups did not understand the point of the campus directions activities but now they seem to realize the importance of writing precise and clear directions.

I checked out the Purdue OWL site for information on the technical resume. I'm working on a presentation outline. One excellent resource is the ResumeDo's and Don'ts. The list of Power Verbs is another useful resource. The site also provides various sample resume formats including the Chronological resume. Finally, the Developing a Winning Resume section provides basic resume information.

The oral presentations went really well. The four groups that presented were very prepared. They all used PowerPoint, which was not a requirement. We had not even discussed PowerPoint in class but each group presented organized and effective PowerPoint presentations. I noticed that each group had one student who spoke more than the others, which was expected. The presentations were 18-20 minutes with a 10 minute question period after every presentation. The students asked a lot of thoughtful questions about their classmates' presentations. Each group member was required to answer at least one question. I was very impressed with the oral presentations and I can't wait for next week's presentations.

I've been following two e-lists, WPA-L and TechRhet. On WPA-L there are numerous job vacancy postings but there is also a lot of useless information. TechRhet, on the other hand, includes many informative posts on new tools and technologies.

Tomorrow the groups in Communications for Engineers will give oral presentations on their proposals. I'm excited to see their presentations, since many of the groups have developed creative ideas for the proposal. I expect all the students to do well. More than likely this is a population of students that's often been told they can't write well or they can't give a good oral presentation. Therefore, we hope to help them build confidence in public speaking. We've already explained to the students that the presentations will be relaxed and low pressure, so I hope they aren't too nervous. But based on their discussions in Blackboard I think most of the groups will be really prepared.

I worked with Microsoft Producer today. I'm having trouble figuring out how to change the time settings on the screen movie. It set the duration of all the slides at 30 seconds and most of the slides will not require that much time in the presentation. I couldn't figure out how to change the duration of individual slides. Besides the timing difficulty, I really liked using Producer. It was really easy to import slides and create a table of contents, even without headers on the actual slides. I haven't tried to add audio yet, so that may present another challenge.

I enjoyed reading the Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs article that Dr. Moxley distributed in class. This article, by Susan C. Herring; Lois Ann Scheidt; Sabrina Bonus; and Elijah Wright, provides a thorough introduction to blogging. The entire article is basically an extended blog definition, supported by data and statistics. I think this article would be appropriate for freshmen in Composition courses as an introduction to the genre and to interest them in blogging. The instructor could provide this article when introducing students to blogging. The diagram on page three explains the different type of blogs visually. I enjoyed reading all the statistics and learning more about what other bloggers are doing. The data is fascinating and I enjoyed determining where my blog fit in based on the statistics.