Posts

Maintaining Motivation

Maintaining motivation, to me, is something that occurs on two separate timeframes. You have maintaining motivation for your daily tasks, which I find easy, like doing chores, homework, etc. However, I find it hard to keep motivation to achieve a long term goal or to work towards something that has to constantly be on your mind and ask for your attention. For instance, deciding to get into shape is a commitment, and it takes consistency, time, and dedication. Deciding to get a college degree requires consistency, time, and dedication. These attributes that come with long term goals are what make the reward worth the effort. So, I am glad to have found items in this module that help one stay motivated to keep reaching these long term goals.

One of my longtime fears of getting old is becoming content and unwilling to learn new things. I am also dramatically scared of the cognitive decline that is associated with aging. Therefore, the information that the module gave me about ways a person can influence their own cognitive ability gave me hope. For example, exercise is shown to boost the size of the hippocampus, responsible for verbal memory and learning, showing that it can not only keep your body sharp, but your mind sharp as well. You can also control the amount of sleep you get in many instances of students. Harvard studies also show that getting the proper amount of sleep each night improves learning and memory.

Searching and Researching

The most useful thing that I have learned from this module is putting together a resource guidebook. It is such a simple idea, but I feel that it has tremendous upside potential for the little effort that you have to put into the project. It is also something that can be accessed and modified at any point in time. I have already used the resources from Career and Counseling Services, which is a resource that I have in my guidebook from Module 1 on campus resources. I will continue to use it in the future, and constantly add resources that should be used for my endeavors in the near future.

I feel that the guidebook is specifically useful for students and resources for the classes that they will be taking. For students, however; I feel that the list should be updated a little more frequently than if you are a working professional. However, that is solely my opinion based on the fact the OSU students take a new set of classes every semester. You can rotate the resources in your guidebook and sort them by class. Even though it is my opinion that the guidebook is more useful on average for students, it might be deemed useful by a person at any walk of life who just needs a database of useful references and resources.
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Listening Strategies Module

The tips from this module have been the most useful and applicable tips so far. However, it was interesting to find that the most useful tip that I learned was from the video that I had to find for my discussion post for the week. I believe this is because I am currently taking a public speaking class online, so the tips described in that video were the most immediately applicable. The video asked me to focus on my posture and physicality while I present my speeches, which I have already implemented.

Currently, for COMM 2110, I am working on a speech that promotes the value of a product or item. It will be important for me to control my posture and physicality because I need to seem confident in my items if I am going to have people believe in what I am selling them. This leads to things I can incorporate for the future. I need to develop an outline for my speech, and I believe that pandering to my audience, a tip from the video that I uploaded, will be crucial in a speech that claims the value of a product. It will also be important for picking the item that I am claiming value for. I know that my audience is going to be mainly college aged students, therefore; it will be important to select a product that would be useful in their respective aspects of life. For instance, it could be something that makes class easier.

My tip for students, after working through this module, is to find additional resources outside of those that your instructors prepare for you. Without the YouTube video that I was required to look up during this module, I never would have found the tip about keeping a water bottle during speeches to cover up awkward pauses. This is a tip that I can incorporate for the rest of my life, which I would have not found if I had stuck to the resources given by my public speaking class.

Active Reading

The most useful thing that I’ve learned in this module is the lesson on active reading. A lot of times, I often find myself skimming through passages or getting lost in my own thoughts while I am reading for class. Often times, I find myself having to reread paragraphs and go over my notes again when I am not totally focused in on what I am reading.

I feel that the best strategy to get over this is to take notes. By actively doing something else to remember the information, you have to focus much more on the information that you are putting on the page. For the future, I plan to continue to take notes while I am reading. It is something that is helpful because it requires you to put more effort into your readings. For future students, I advise them to make sure that there is another method in which you incorporate the reading into your memory, while reading, because it forces you to activate different parts of your brain whole doing one task. The more activation you achieve during this task, the more it is ingrained into your memory. Notes, for me, was the way to activate more of the brain.

Module 3 Blog Post.

Hello All,

This week we learned how to set up a calendar and tasks manager using Google’s online platform. The most useful thing that I learned in this module was how to set up a calendar. An online calendar is nice because you can edit and rearrange the calendar at anytime, anywhere. The epiphany, for me, is similar to the discovery of dropbox. It makes life a lot simpler. I have not used any tips from the module in daily practice yet, but I hope to change that with this coming week as well as the coming semester.

Once the fall semester starts for Ohio State, I will use Google Calendar and Google Tasks substantially more. I feel like it is an easy way to consolidate all of the things that I have to do for the week while also making it easy to access this information on all platforms, which I feel is the shining jewel for this module. The consolidated, seamless changing of platforms is what made me really like Apple products, and it is becoming the reason for why I like Google’s platform. If I were to give advice to students and young professionals, then it would be to ditch the physical calendar and to-do list and switch to the digital version that allows you access at anytime and anywhere.

What I Learned

The most useful thing that I learned in Module 2 is the use of my own time. While making the spreadsheet for time tracking, I started to think about the things that I do in a normal day. I realized that visualizing the things and times at which I do those things, can help me manage my time better. For instance, I was working on this discussion post at 10:30, and then had to take my siblings to see their stepfather on Father’s Day evening. I believed that I had enough time to do so and make it back home in enough time to complete my blog post for module 2. If I had made the time tracking sheet for today, then I would have likely realized that I would not have enough time to complete both tasks. The inability to visualize my actions beforehand caused me to submit a late blog post and this module has taught me to change my actions for the future. My advice for future students will be to make sure all items for a due date are completed before the due date even arrives. This will relieve the stress of even having to worry about it the day that it is due, and it will allow for leeway when family matters come up the same way they did tonight.