My ICC theme is Inquiry, Imagination, and Innovation. I took an Ithaca Seminar called Numbers in the Media. We talked a lot about how numbers, especially in political polls, advertising, and health information, are sometimes misleading. Sometimes I think people see statistics or other numbers and either just assume they are true or just glaze over and ignore them. It was good to learn how numbers really can be used to convey information accurately and that most presentations of numbers and statistics leave out lots of important information that we need to know to decide what the numbers really mean. This course really got at the question of "How do we know what's true?"
My artifact for my Ithaca Seminar is the slides that I used in my news article analysis assignment. The purpose of the assignment was to find a published media account that uses numbers and analyze both the numbers themselves and the way that they are presented by the media. This illustrates the Ithaca Seminar goal of "developing and evaluating ideas and arguments", because the whole point is to evaluate the arguments made by both the researchers performing the study on heart attacks and the way that information is presented in the newspaper account. It also addresses the Ithaca Seminar goal of "demonstrate consideration of context, audience comprehension, and purpose in written and oral communication". My audience for the presentation was my classmates, who have a lot of the same basic knowledge about analyzing numbers that I do, so I didn't have to define terms like "sample" or explain what I meant by "credible". My purpose for the assignment was to inform my class about where the article was strong and where it needed more information; I think I provided a pretty balanced picture of the New York Times article.
This coming semester I'm taking Women in Popular Music: From Bessie Smith to MTV for my creative arts course. One of my friends took it last semester and she said it's a really good class. I'm not sure yet what artifact I'll put in my portfolio.
For my social science ICC course, I took a class on sociolinguistics (how people use language in society). I was able to participate on a research team for a study on swearing. Doing the research was way more interesting than just learning about the methods people use to study language. One thing that surprised me was that you go into a study thinking that everything is set and then people seemed to interpret some of the survey questions differently than we thought they would or even when we used measures that had been published before, we got low reliability in our study. Studying swearing also helped us see how different people have different expectations for how to behave in a work setting and that some people see words as swearing while others see the same words as regular words. Those differences in expectations likely reflect different values and beliefs that people have about how to use language and what language means. The study also revealed that social context is really important in how appropriate people found swearing. I figured that people would find swearing more okay in social settings than in formal work meetings, but I was surprised at how much difference there was. I think it would be interesting to develop the research further by looking at other contexts, like religious contexts or college classrooms, and see what kinds of language people think is okay to use or inappropriate to use and to see how these contexts are similar to or different from the workplace.
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