Friendly, relaxed Newfoundland

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A few notes from my first full day in St. John’s, Newfoundland at the 29th Annual Qualitative Analysis Conference; scholars that get together to talk about experiences, insights, and innovations in using qualitative research methods.

I couldn’t help but think about the communication practices of Newfoundlanders as I started my morning off at the local Timmy’s, everybody chatty (some more than others) and ready to engage in a conversation at the drop of a hat, to complete strangers. It was a nice feeling just to be in that atmosphere and it set the tone and my mission for the rest of the day – trying to notice what other kinds of communication made up the culture of Newfoundland.

Masking tape and all.

As I walked back to Memorial University and crossed Elizabeth Ave., I was startled when the little guy on the “walk” light told me I had 44 seconds. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than 28 seconds anywhere in the west. As the day went on, I had other chances to see up to 68 seconds and nothing less than 33. Could this be a symbol of a more relaxed atmosphere?

After a day of research presentations, I decided to figure out the bus system and head downtown for a walk around. What better way to really get a feel for the local community? In all the places where I have ever had the opportunity to ride the bus (San Francisco, Puerto Rico, Vancouver, to name a few) I have never had quite the experience I had today. First the bus driver greeted everybody that got on the bus (many by name), and shouted out to have a great day when they got out at the back. They shouted back thanks every time. I made sure I did when I got off as well. As I sat down a bit back from the driver I noticed a sign that I had never seen on any bus before – a “friendly” note to help make sure that patrons didn’t leave the bus forgetting a possession. More evidence.

It was a great day enjoying the friendliness on the Rock and doing a little qualitative communication research.

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Dr. Marcella LaFever (University of New Mexico, 2005) is an Associate Professor in the Communications Department at the University of the Fraser Valley. She specializes in intercultural communication and brings that expertise to various subjects such as communication for workplace, instruction, social media, team and public speaking contexts.

An idea whose time has come for UFV?

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University of Nevade Late StartWhile waiting for my double-shot latté at Café Bibo this morning, at the south end of the University of Nevada, Reno campus, a flyer caught my eye. It asked if I “had a _ in my spring schedule?” The _ was a hole punched in the card. Intrigued, I turned it over and found a promotion for signing up for “late-start, weekend” classes.

In the Communications Department we have often toyed with the idea of adding Saturday classes and as far as I can tell we are all for the idea. The thing that gets in our way of course, is that we are maxed out on the number of sections we can offer and they are all full, so why would we need to? The idea of adding a late-start section to our offerings would not necessarily change that situation but perhaps it would add a valuable option and my guess is that it would fill up. Why? Because with students scrambling in the first two weeks to sort out their schedules, playing leap-frog to try to get into courses they need, having a class (or many classes across campus) that start a few weeks into the term would take off some of the pressure on both students and instructors.

What do you think?

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Dr. Marcella LaFever (University of New Mexico, 2005) is an Associate Professor in the Communications Department at the University of the Fraser Valley. She specializes in intercultural communication and brings that expertise to various subjects such as communication for workplace, instruction, social media, team and public speaking contexts.

 

The future of public communication of science and technology

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All in the name of science

All in the name of scienceDoes science communication have a place in the university? I briefly interrupted my search for the best gelato in Florence to contemplate this question during a session at the 2012 Public Communication of Science and Technology Conference. While Bruce Lewenstein from Cornell University, Suzanne de Cheveigne from CNRS in France, and Brian Trench from Dublin City University didn’t reach agreement on this topic, the lively discussion prompted me to consider my own position as a science communication researcher, practitioner, and teacher at UFV.

When I consider the environmental problems facing us in the Fraser Valley – including declining salmon populations, water availability, and a proposed expansion of a pipeline pumping tar sands oil through our region – I realize that science communicators are in positions to influence how people respond to health concerns, our environment, technology uptake and careers in science.

Brian Trench argued that the public communication of science and technology belongs at the university because it is already part of undergraduate and postgraduate programs, including Dublin City University’s Masters of Science Communication Program. Trench speculated on whether science communication will survive as a distinct field; its interdisciplinary nature makes it unique but also vulnerable without a key discipline to support it.

I found myself nodding in response to Suzanne de Cheveigne’s comments that knowledge only comes with specialization. Science communication researchers use tools from a wide variety of disciplines: communication studies, sociology, history, psychology, and philosophy. It is important for researchers to know and use these tools well, gaining expertise that only comes from in-depth study into each area.

Bruce Lewenstein argued that science communication doesn’t necessarily belong at the university but in institutions that work between the intersection of science and the public, such as San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Science communication has traditionally been an importer of ideas from other disciplines rather than an exporter, but its focus on the boundary between theory and practice in engaging publics makes it unique.

I saw evidence of this combining of theory and practice everywhere at the conference, with researchers, journalists, policymakers, and practitioners for science museums contemplating new science communication work from a range of perspectives including values, aesthetics, notions of the sublime, ethics of science communication, and the constitution of publics. So, while establishing academic credibility may be important (I met a new crop of researchers with PhDs in Science Communication), for me science communication’s real value remains in its goal to make science accessible to everyone.

This emphasis on accessibility means considering science communication’s place not just at the university but in all levels of government, in the press, within secondary education and informal education institutions, and so on.

Filled with new enthusiasm and insights into the role of science communication in society, I can return to my other quest for superlative gelat0. Already I can report that if you are ever in Florence, you owe it to yourself to visit Grom, but I’ll keep you posted about any other great locations my search uncovers.

CMNS degree survey results and draw prize winners

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In February the Office of Institutional Research released an online survey to find out if there was interest among UFV students in a Communications degree.

We’re very grateful to the large numbers of respondents who took the opportunity to share their thoughts. In all we had over 600 responses to the survey, with over a third indicating they would be “Interested” or “Very interested” in pursuing a degree in Communications. With that enthusiastic support we’ll continue developing the full degree proposal.

We had offered as enticement the chance to win UFV Bookstore gift certificates for survey respondents, and here are the lucky winners:

$50 certificate – Janelle Harder

$25 certificate – Robin Anderson

$25 certificate – Cindy Cooper

Congratulations to the lucky winners, and thanks again to everyone who took part in the CMNS survey.

CMNS 390 students present documents to UFV staff in end-of-term briefings

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What information does the reader need? What’s the best format to deliver it? These were the essential questions that students in CMNS 390: End-user Documentation Design worked on answering over the Winter 2012 semester in hopes of making the lives of UFV students easier.

This past Wednesday UFV staff from Student Life, Advising, Student Services and Arts Advice were invited to attend document release briefings to ask questions, provide feedback and consider adopting the documents as part of the UFV retinue.

Four student teams, after participating in a focus group session at the beginning of the term, decided to design documents titled:

  • How to $ave Money: A UFV Guide
  • Healthy Eating on an Unhealthy Budget
  • A Practical Guide To Your Degree At The University Of The Fraser Valley
  • Getting Involved at UFV

Kudos to the students on their excellent documents and presentations:

Cameron Cal, Allyssa Epp, Nader Hussein, Anusha Iyengar, Clair Jensen, Jacqueline Klassen, Mitchell Lock, Jillian Lowe, Tammy Macadams, Cassidy Meadows, Maxwell Mooney, Leonard Naimi, Kacey Oravec, Jonathan Vandermey, Jessica Webster.

 

CMNS student Leonard Naimi set to give microlecture at March 29 Student Research Day

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leonard

leonard The Communications Department is proud that one of our students is taking the plunge to show off his talents in this week’s Student Research Day. One of 20 students giving microlectures, Leonard Naimi will be speaking about his directed studies research titled “The Baha’i Faith’s Approach to Intercultural Communication and Peace Practices: A Comparison to Current Conflict Theory”. With only three minutes to talk about what he has discovered, we know it will be a bit of a daunting task. However, we’re not too worried because, as the winner of the 2011 CMNS 235 Toastmasters scholarship, we know he can do it. In a few months Leonard will be graduating from UFV with a BSc in Chemistry and a minor in Communications.

When asked what motivated him to take so many Communications courses Leonard replied, “I believe it was sometime in my third year when I decided that a minor would help me finish my requirements for the BSc much sooner than I would without one. I felt that, rather than doing a minor only for the sake of finishing my BSc sooner, I would do one that would help me become a better Chemistry high school teacher. As a result, Communications seemed like the perfect fit as it has helped me become both a better speaker and writer.”

Come on out to Student Research Day to celebrate all of our UFV student researchers and make a special point of coming between 11:30 and 12:30 to hear the microlectures. Congratulations to Leonard and, btw, we think he should go on to graduate school.

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Dr. Marcella LaFever (University of New Mexico, 2005) is an Associate Professor in the Communications Department at the University of the Fraser Valley. She specializes in intercultural communication and brings that expertise to various subjects such as communication for workplace, instruction, social media, team and public speaking contexts.

Be Cognizant of Your Interlocutors*

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(*”know your audience”)

Big words have their place in communication, but it’s always worth reflecting on the purpose of those long latinate locutions* (*”big words”). Do they add precision to the point, or are they just props shoehorned into sentences to make the writer seem more knowledgeable? In this short video presentation, copywriter Terin Izil makes the pitch that bigger is not necessarily better when you are reaching for “le mot juste”.

Click the image to view the presentation:

Communications research excellence: Yes we can!

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The Communications Department is gearing up to select the best CMNS paper submitted in the last twelve months. The winning submission will receive a Research Excellence Award, worth $1,000.

Are you a full-time student this semester, or were you a full-time student in Summer/Fall 2012? Did you take (or are you taking) CMNS courses, especially CMNS 155, CMNS 412, or CMNS 490? Did you write a really strong paper in a CMNS course that accomplished any of the following?

  • established the current state of knowledge on a topic/area
  • identified a gap in the existing literature
  • filled that gap with evidence or rational argument
  • interpreted the findings/evidence, generalized it for wider applicability, or demonstrated how it could be used in applied communication practices
  • identified limitations and future work to be done in the area.

If you wrote a paper for a Communications course last year that fits in one or more of the above categories (or you know another UFV student who did), you may want to ask your instructor to nominate the paper for the University’s Research Excellence award.

Don’t be shy. If you are really proud of a paper or report you completed for a CMNS course, or you were really impressed by the work one of your classmates did, let your instructor know that you think that work should be recognized.

Instructors in the Communications Department will be submitting their nominations on Tues, April 17, and then arm-wrestling to determine which submission is the best…. (No, we don’t do that! In fact, a committee will carefully measure each submission to see which one best represents the department and the communications discipline, and that paper will be forwarded as the department’s selection for the Research Excellence award.)

Cell Phone Etiquette in 2012

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“It is customary nowadays to deplore the fact that the art of letter-writing has fallen into decay, and when we read that the entire correspondence of an engaged couple recently was carried on for two years by telephone and telegraph we are inclined to believe it.”

 — Lilian Eichler, Book of Etiquette Vol. I, 1924

“Etiquette” is a word with prissy connotations, recalling books with chapters on how to behave at tea parties, the most acceptable way to decline a wedding invitation, and so on. But conventions govern all our social interactions whether we like it or not, and an enormous amount of information is communicated by the way we “comport” ourselves with other people. Simple example: an office romance was exposed at a group lunch when a person absent-mindedly plucked an olive off the plate of the person sitting next to them and ate it. If you take a piece of food off someone’s plate and eat it, you are communicating a LOT about your relationship with that person.

The thing about rules of etiquette is that they evolve by consensus and over time. Social norms around eating, for example, have had millennia to develop. When rapid technological change affects people’s behaviour it’s hard for the conventions that help us negotiate our interactions (in a word, etiquette) to keep up. The proliferation of cell phones is one example, as anyone who has watched someone take a phone call in a movie theatre will understand. (Pro tip: do not answer your phone at the movies.)

I’ve noticed that no widely-accepted norms exist for cell phone behaviour when you’re in the company of other people. Is it considered rude to interrupt a f2f conversation to take a call, for instance? (I did an informal census, only to learn that opinions differ widely.) What about sending a text message or three, or checking Facebook updates, or replying to email? As the communication instruments in our hands gain functionality, how do we balance the demands of the device against the social expectations of those who are literally in our faces?

I’m not sure if this will catch on, but a recent attempt to introduce some cell phone etiquette to social situations, called “Don’t Be a D*ck During Meals“, has gone a little bit viral on the Internet. The basic rules are simple: when you’re at a restaurant with friends or family all cell phones go in a pile in the middle of the table. The first person to touch their phone before the bill arrives has to pay for everyone. If no one succumbs to the urge, the bill is divided up as per usual social conventions.

I’d be interested to hear what you think of this “game”, as well as the rules and conventions you observe when it comes to your cell phone behaviour in public, with friends or with family.

cell-phoners

Student Survey

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Communications department student survey & prize draw

The Communications department is looking for student input into their degree proposal plans. Please take five minutes to complete the survey at the link below, and then if interested you can enter to win one of three gift certificates from the UFV bookstore.

http://bit.ly/cmns-survey

The survey and contest end on Fri, March 9.