Introduction to Communications

Task 1: give a presentation about our courses, future jobs, skill & roles in those future jobs

Takeaways:

Hard skills vs soft skills
-communications is a soft skill
-but communication is also the bridge between hard and soft skills

there is no perfect presentation
-every group presented differently even though our courses were similar and a structure was imposed on the presentation
-the purpose of this unit is not to tell you how to do the perfect presentation, but instead to give you the safety net - that is what tends to work an what doesn't

Task 2: give a presentation on a given example of communication - in our case a spam email - on its characteristics in terms of the shannon-weaver communications model, its objectives, the types of relationship it establishes, and how efective it is

A revision of the Shannon weaver model

commmunications_model.jpg
-sender/encoder
-receiver/decoder
-channel/medium
-interference
-feedback

Takeaways:

In written communiction, a common mistake is assuming prior knowledge of the of the user. Point-in-case: the Ryobi instruction manual that would be understood easily by people with specific technical training, but not at all by the average user/the target audience. Thus as IT professionals we shoudl avoid using technical jargon / geekspeak / l33tspeak when communicating to non IT people; use plain languag that the layperson can understand.

In terms of communication, what works well is effective communication - however this very much depends on the specific situation, as what works well for one purpose may not work well with another. For example, there are some instances where verbal communication is more effective than written, and vice versa. This is where analyis using the Shannon-weaver communications model comes into play.
Thus what we should learn (from this unit) is a framework of what tends to work well. Combine this with the ability to improvise this generic communications know-how to each specific situation and its target audience, and we take away great communications skills; which is a very important part of our professional skills.

I feel that some time should have been devoted to identifying and understanding target audiences, since this understanding was integral to the rest of communication we have learnt about this week.