Group Blog 4

As we wrap up the semester, it's interesting to look back on how we've changed our views, thanks to both our event and the class. Our group project happened at Madison Elementary on Friday, October 10, and it definitely required us to communicate with everyone. The diversity was widespread as the kids came from different family types (single moms, nuclear families, and even grandparents watching them), different races, different economic groups, and different cultures. They all gathered in the gymnasium to paint pumpkins, play games, earn prizes and just have a fun night as families. As a whole, we identify diversity in more ways than we may have originally seen it and caused us to think more about how we're communicating with others that are diverse from ourselves. Often times we think about diversity in terms of our peers and people we interact with on a regular basis but as witnessed at the family fun night there was a lot of diversity in children based on their ages, attitudes and maturity levels.

After doing our mini “experiment” with our computers, we've also had a chance to reflect on communication modes, particularly non-traditional ones (such as facebook). We began to consider how an increase in use of those has not only lowered our interaction with others, but probably also reduced our interpersonal communication skills. Another aspect of our mini experiment has to do with mass media and how it is related to communication ethics. The mass media has a a lot of power and some times persuades people to think differently. Although ethical decisions should be use in every kind of media, it is not.

Another topic discussed in class was about disabilities and communication ethics. Disability is a hard to deal with sometimes because most people’s first instinct is to kind of stare at the person that is disabled and then feel sorry for them and want to help them out. When in reality they just want to be treated just like a “normal” able-bodied person.

Another interesting point we found was when working with the blog, we had realized how one another is able to do things and reacts to certain situations. We have learned that you have to be fully present in order it be able to deal with certain situations. We feel that ethic of care is really important since we wanted the children to know that we do care about everyone of them, and that we are not going to be picking a certain one out of the group.

Here are two pictures that relate to our blog and what we have discussed in class.

The first pictures relates to our discussion on disabilities and communication ethics. This picture is a good representation of ethics relates to disabilities.


The second picture is depicts many people of different culture holding hands and celebrating their differences. The caption on this picture describes how are group feels about communication ethics and diversity.



While writing this blog our group found some really informative websites.The first website has a lot of information on disabilities that could help make better ethical decisions. The second website is an informative article about social networking.

http://www.disabilityinfo.gov/digov-public/public/DisplayPage.do?parentFolderId=500

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/technology/social-networking.html