Week 13 Discussion: Post 3

3). Pick one concept from throughout the semester that you feel can use further discussion.

            I think that a lot of the concepts in the Small Groups Text were very helpful when trying to work with a group. I feel like the hardest part of this class was trying to work with a group and the concepts taught in this book were actually very helpful. One concept that I would like to further discuss is effective leadership. I think that effective leadership was very important when it came to group work within this class. I remember blogging about this in post earlier in the semester, I wrote “[effective leaders] themselves as leaders want to succeed, as well as want their group to succeed, so they motivate their group members to work harder. When the leader displays hard work that leads to success, the group members are influenced to achieve just as their leader. It is sort of like the phrase “lead by example””. I still think this is true. Working with our group we definitely played our roles and I feel like there was distinct leader in our group and without this group member we wouldn’t have gotten our assignment done in time. 

Week 13 Discussion: Post 2

2). What was your favorite thing about the class?  What was your least favorite thing about the class?  How can this class be improved?  Again, be specific.

            My favorite thing about this class was the freedom to choose when you wanted to do the work. At the beginning of the semester, I chose to take this class online since it did not fit my schedule at all. Being that the class was online I was able to do most of my assignments in between classes and sometimes during work which made it very convenient for me. I liked that I was able to work at my own pace. My least favorite thing about this class was all of the group projects. I found that these were very inconvenient especially with my busy schedule. I felt that it was really hard to get 5 people with 5 different schedules together. I found myself stressing over not being able to meet with my group instead of not being able to do the work. The reason why I didn’t take the class in person was because I couldn’t take the time out of my schedule to do the work and group projects sort of defeated the purpose of an online class. 

Week 13 Discussion: Post 1

1). What have you learned in this class over the course of the semester?  Be specific.

            To be honest, when I first enrolled into this class, I didn’t even know what I was going to be learning in this class. I had no idea what “Critical Thinking” entailed, but throughout the semester I was able to define some of the main concepts. The main concepts learned in this class to me were claims and arguments. After learning the general concepts of what claims and arguments were, I was able to decipher if the argument or claim was not strong, too vague or even to believe if their argument was a reliable source. I think my favorite thing that I learned in this class was learning about apple-polishing or any of the posts where we were able to describe the fallacies of advertisements. Being able to connect what we blog about to what we see in the everyday world actually made me feel that I really understood the concept. Instead of making up my own examples, I was able to look onto the web and find ads that would pop up and use what I learned about appeal to emotion or apple-polishing to judge the ad. Overall, I learned a lot more about what I felt that I already knew about critical thinking.