Post 3

I was very intrigued by the use of fear in our communication with others. Fear is a great driving factor in what decision a person can make. Fear can cause rational people to make irrational choices, which of course never leads to anything good. If a person wanted the masses to do something that they knew was wrong, that person just needs to instill fear. Look at World War II as an example, Hitler created fear amongst his people that Jews were trying to take over and were inferior people. Therefore, the Jews should be eliminated. Sociologists have attempted to study how normal people could do what they did. And that answer is easy, they were gripped by fear. Have we learned our lesson? No, take a more modern example, the war in Iraq. George Bush used fear to justify his invasion of Iraq. He used fear by telling the American public that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when in reality, Bush needed an excuse to topple Sadamn Hussein. So will we ever learn from history? Probably not, but we need to be aware when we are making decisions because of fear.

Post 2

What was your favorite thing about the class? What was your least favorite thing about the class? How can this class be improved?

My favorite part of this class was the group work. I enjoyed doing all the projects and working with people in my groups. The projects were challenging and at times an ordeal because of trying to work out the times with people. As fun as it was working with people, I truly would have liked to change up the groups so that way I could have met more people. That was definitely the challeng of this class, not meeting people. As I stated in my previous blog, having an online class is something I will never do again. What could have been done to make this class better is a mandatory class where everyone meets together. At least changing groups could have been fun because working with other people could have developed more friends.

Post 1

What did I learn from this class?

I learned all about the different ways that we can communicate through non verbal means. Communication is so much more than just speech and what we say. I learned that fear is the greatest motivating factor of people because fear grips people and leads them to do things that they would never do.

On a non-academia level, I learned never to take another online class. At first, I thought an online class might be fun, not going to class and not meeting people. But taking an online class is actually a lot of work. It was not fun having an online class because I never got to meet any of the people in my class except the group I was assigned. I would have enjoyed the class more if we could have switched groups so we could meet more people. Taking an online class is something I could never do again because I get lazy and this class made my laziness come out even more.