The SLP Experience...

I have learned a lot already in my SLP project. It has taught me about communication, and how sometimes it can be strained or poorly expressed. It has taught me, for example, that the questions that I might ask are different than the questions another might ask. My document is a survey of community families, aimed towards homeschoolers. It always impresses me how people with so much in common (my SLP partner and I) can still have such different thought processes, and hold such differently unique perspectives. I am grateful to have the opportunity to learn from a fresh point of view.

Definition Project - Coronary Bypass

My Group did fairly well, I think. There was a lot of confusion and stress in the group as we went about working on our definitions project. I was the leader of our group, which focused on defining the term and operation “coronary bypass.” We studied the etymology, history, and operative principles concerning coronary bypass, as well as some of the tools that are needed to complete the procedure. We also provided a picture of the end product, which illustrated the heart after the grafts had been completed.

There was, from time to time, some hardship in reconciling some of the information against other pieces of information. This was mainly semantics, however, as the actual facts did fit together – they simply needed to be better explained in reference to one another. In the end I felt that while we were given a short time in which to fulfill the assignment, we did admirably and well in our labor.

SLP Update!

The document that I am developing is going quite well. This last week I worked on the survey that Heather, the owner of Beloved Books, wanted me to work on. Initially, I was uncertain about how I would format it. After some time and thought, I began working on it. After some cursory writing, I had a good general draft of the flier. I then spoke with Mark Elswick, a tutor in the Davenport University LInC, about critiquing it. He suggested several changes, including some line spacing and font adjustments, and some asthetic changes to make the document easier on the eyes. I have not yet met with Heather Idoni, but I did touch base with her about the project via phone. She is very excited to see my work so far, and I am certain that the rough draft of the survey will be compatible with her standards.

The First Steps: Starting my SLP

I was given the opportunity recently to approach Heather Idoni, a friend and business owner, about working together in a Service Learning Project. Heather has a successful business selling books and cds online, and is very involved in homeschooling activities. She is a mother of five, a shrewd business woman, and a passionate advocate of homeschooling and family-centered education. Her business, Beloved Books, has impacted the local homeschooling community in a big way, and she is well known as a philanthropist in that regard.

The document that Heather wants me to create is a survey. The purpose of the survey is to gather information about the patrons of her store: more specifically, to learn what families’ homeschool, how many children they have, and how open they are to being involved in other community activities. The survey covers basic information, and provides some open-ended questions about service and customer wants.

I am excited to see what will come of this new working relationship. I have known Heather for a long while - ever since I was a teenaged homeschooler, in fact. I know from experience that she is a dynamic woman and a driven and motivated person, and for this reason I feel that we will mesh well together. While we are only in the opening stages of our work relationship, I sense great things to come!

Service Learning: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff?

Employers today have an ideal environment for hiring. With a full-on recession in effect, the workplace is flooded with unemployed workers. In addition to this, there is a whole generation of students that are frantic to get a job in their field, let alone a dream job. With so many options, any prospective business or corporation may have whomever they wish to fill their ranks. Only the most aggressive, well-trained and experienced people will be given serious consideration.

So, what does this mean for students fresh out of school? Rudimentary theory and basic job skills are no longer enough to guarantee that the clean-shaven college grad will get the coveted position that he has worked so hard for. Our young men and women need something to set them apart – or to at least show that there is some real, gritty experience to strengthen their greenness.

This is where service learning can be of tremendous help. Service learning allows a student who is still in school to work and gain real, marketable experience. There are other methods of gaining this credibility: Intern- or externships for example. However, these methods require the student to be subjected to the demands of a central authority. While these means may prove valuable in showing that an intern has the willingness to follow orders, it does not allow creativity. Employers unanimously desire two things in an employee – competency and self-government. Competency refers to the employee’s ability to carry out his or her job function, while self government means much more. Self-government is a workers ability to govern themselves through maintaining a good work ethic, developing a drive to perfect his or her talents. There are few opportunities to develop such a skill when you are constantly monitored by some form of oversight. Service learning, on the other hand, is not a form of benevolent dictatorship. It is, rather, a cooperative effort between two separate entities that is voluntary and relatively spontaneous. It permits creative energy, exchange of ideas, and unified effort. These are all part of self-government as it relates to our professional lives.

Service learning is an excellent opportunity to gain experience in your field, while showing prospective employers that you have the ability to work with others, engage in team projects, and complete assignments without the need of oversight. Completing a service learning project will demonstrate the qualities of creativity, dedication, perseverance, professionalism, and conscientiousness in your work ethic. Employers cannot help but be impressed!

How To Cultivate a Courteous and Professional Online Identity

There are many forums online in which one may participate while in the huge ocean of the internet. There are social networking sites all over – in fact, there are new sites opening every day. We as individuals have the ability to express ourselves digitally as we never have before. However, these new galleries we have made for ourselves show a lot more about ourselves than we think. Therefore, we need to be careful about how we go about revealing ourselves to the public, and how much we reveal.

For this reason, it is good to assess what the strengths are of social networking. Social networking allows us a greater amount of contact with a greater number of people in a smaller amount of time. take, for example, instant messaging or IMing. IMing is far mor efficient than speaking on the phone, in most cases. One can converse with multiple people at the same time, while keeping each strand of conversation coherent and understandable. Also, email, the posting of photo or video links, and sound bytes allow for the exchange of information to take place far more smoothly than through conventional phone or even face to face dialogue. Mostly though, the draw to social networking is the ability to craft our own unique persona for others to see. There are some negative effects to social networking, however.

Social networking online allows for fast and easy exchange of information and the creation of a personal brand. However, this form of communication lacks several important functions. Firstly, it lacks the communicative properties of tone and body language. Tone is that distinguishing feature that allows us to communicate with meaning not merely through words but also with inflection, with emotion or feeling. This is both a physical and verbal trait, which combined with body language make up the greater part of what we use on a day to day basis for communication. Some well versed writers can give tone to their writing, but this is not at all a common ability. There is absolutely no way to show body language. Therefore, clear, direct sentences and adherence to context are the most necessary parts of social networking. Social networking is also burdened with the weight of association. Associations and relationships, which are so necessary to us personally and in life in general, are sometimes too private to allow others to see. Social networking, while having many positive features, can also be a hindrance to emotional communication and to our professional image.

In conclusion, there is a list of do’s and don’ts regarding social networking, as well as a few suggestions.

Do:
• Be aware of how you are portraying yourself to the public. Never let yourself or anyone else sully your reputation.
• Be careful of whom you align yourself with – who your friends are. These are who you are associated most strongly with, and an employer will assume that you hold similar values with them.
• Be courteous and conscientious! Having good mannerisms and being tactful are the most effective tools of interpersonal communication and using them well shows others that you are a skilled and understanding communicator.
• Regularly provide sources for your information (Wikipedia, website URLs, etc.)

Don’t:
• Don’t put anything online that you would not want your mother to see (inappropriate/private pictures, video, or dialogue). Ironically, your mother’s standard of propriety is probably going to be very similar to that of most professional headhunters and employers.
• Never leave posts that are in any way vindictive or overly negative in public. If you get hired by a business, they want to know that if troubles arise you can be counted on to work them out without slandering the company to others you meet or know.
• Never be a rumor-mill. Unfounded or ill-informed gossip can return and wreak destruction on others and severely discredit you or put you in a negative light.
• Never underestimate the power of words, either written or spoken. They have a tendency to get analyzed with a microscope, and they are not easy to get rid of. If you must say something, be sure to say what you mean. It is difficult to misunderstand a direct statement. It is better to say something directly and take responsibility for it up front than it is to say something unclearly, be accused of something, and “take it back” or say it was a misunderstanding. As always, if you must say something negative, say it in private, be direct and make it tactful.

A few suggestions in closing…
• Ask yourself: do I feel the need to have an open social network that anyone can see? If you feel that it is necessary, here are a few possibilities you might explore…
• Make your social profile private. You will still be able to search for friends and communicate with others, but for anyone to see your profile in its entirety, they will have to have your permission
• If you must have a public social profile, make it simple and easy to monitor. Have control over who posts there, and make it clear as to what you think is acceptable. You should still have a private profile for your close friends and relatives, to protect their privacy as well.

My Business Card

A Good Name Is Worth…

What is the worth of a good name? The Christian bible states that we should “Choose a good reputation over great riches, for being held in high esteem is better than having silver or gold.” (Proverbs 22:1, NLT bible) In the realm of our professional and personal influence, nothing is more important than having a good reputation. This is why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is so essential to our digital lives.

What is an online reputation? An online reputation is basically what someone sees about you through your online presence. What site do you regularly post on? What are your social networks, and who are your friends on them? What articles or other texts have you published? Some of these places are available to casual observation on the first page of a search, and with a bit more persistence all of them are able to be dug up by a tenacious stalker.

Since we all have an online reputation to some extent, it is important that we take healthy responsibility for it. First of all, we should find what information is out there regarding ourselves. Next, we should discern whether we like how we are portrayed on the web. If there are statements that may be hindering to the image that we desire to create, we should dismantle them ourselves, and if necessary ask the page administrator for assistance. Next, there is the necessity to be proactive about putting out positive and professional sources of information about ourselves. After fixing our image and promoting it, we should be careful to cultivate it and check up on it from time to time. This is the ORM, Online Reputation Management. Always remember: a good name is the foundation of success in any area of the professional sphere. Make certain that your online self is every bit as polished and genuine as you are in person!

A World of Change...

There is no question that the American workplace is under intense pressure to change. The cushioned jobs that our predecessors held through the last fifty years are going out with the tide of jobs that are flowing overseas.

The real question that we must ask concerns not those that came before but those who are coming onto the scene now – the young adults that will make up the next generation of workers. What will they do to secure their own success, and the success of their children and other subsequent generations? The economic depression which we find ourselves mired in is both disturbing and dangerous. We see the possibility of failure and destruction clearly and in high definition on CNN. However, what we do not perceive as young people are the opportunities that we have in this situation: we will soon be the main niche market for this country economically. Our demands influence the large majority of sales and through our purchases large amounts of revenue are produced. What we have to do with that responsibility is direct that demand. We should point it in a direction which will bring about prosperity in time for our country, instead of pursuing idle fancies, goods and services that hold little value or utility. As young people we encourage sellers to give us IPods, video games and high definition TV’s. We should demand better technology in manufacturing, more efficient methods of agriculture, and more efficient allocations of resources and employment. We as young people have the opportunity to demand those things as goods or services. Doing so will help the cause of our whole country and bring us from the brink of decadence and destructive self –interest.

In conclusion, let’s focus our change in the area of the goods and services that we demand. In doing so, we will alter the demand of our economy and bring it towards a healthier place. As a bonus, we will have more resources (and employment!) to allocate to the important things in life such as fuel, energy, water distribution and housing. Forget the IPods!

The Usefulness of Career Inventories

Career inventories are very useful for several reasons: first, they are built to expose the hidden strengths and weaknesses of the individual that is using them. You can learn a lot about yourself, both professionally and personally from a test such as the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. Second, a career inventory test is built in such a way that the information that is garnered is at least marginally trustworthy, since the test is impartial and mathematically weighted. For example, it would not be easy to foul up or otherwise misstate yourself accidentally in the Myers-Briggs test, since the same question is often stated in many different ways. Third, a career inventory is able to be given out to most anyone at any age, since it assumes a low basic level of literacy from the test-taker. all in all, career inventories are definitely an asset to both the prospective employee and employer.

My Mission Statement: Learning How to Learn - The Importance of Understanding and Wisdom in Education

I have always been a student. As a student, I have learned the hard lesson that education is not primarily about learning a subject. In the beginning of my quest for understanding, I thought that I studied history to know what happened in the past – that in mathematics I learned to compute for the sake of economy and wise spending financially. While these were among the products of my education, I quickly realized that this was a secondary achievement: the real reason for pursuing any subject is to learn how to learn. Accepting that we must learn how to learn is the beginning of wisdom. One definition from Merriam-Webster about wisdom states that it is the ability to discern inner qualities and relationships. What is learning, if it is not the mental construction of different experiences and beliefs into a worldview? History isn’t about what happened long ago: it’s about what’s happening now, applying what we know from then to what is transpiring in the world today. Mathematics is not about computing and budgeting: it is about learning to understand a thing without using the physical senses – about seeing with the mind’s eye. These are the real products if a fruitful education. There is no denying the interconnectedness of history and current events or the direct relationship of mathematics to the organization of our minds. My purpose as a person is to teach others the necessary skills and practices which bring about this kind of reasoning. Steven Covey, writer of the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, thought so highly about the necessity to gain understanding that his fifth habit was to seek first to understand, then to be understood. Thinking critically about how and why we learn, and by extension embracing wisdom and understanding, requires a dedication and perseverance that may not be easy for some to give. You have to ask yourself the hard questions. To learn how to learn, you must be endlessly curious, preternaturally bold and abundantly hopeful. I am all of these things. Can you be?

The Page Unturned...

By which of course I mean, the first blog that I have ever created. I am not sure if this will stick, or if transversely I will turn into an unrepentant blogger, facebooker, tweeter, etc. I suppose only time will tell... :)