Discussion 3

Dr. PC

Jul 1, 2019 Jul 1 at 3:47pm

1. Attend/review the OWL workshop on APA style guidelines here: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_overview_and_workshop.html (Links to an external site.)

Preview the document
RUBRIC FOR ROUGH DRAFT evolving.JPG

2. Weigh in on the rubric points (how much should each component be weighted?) You can find the draft FORMAT template here: SAMPLE FORMAT DRAFT REPORT.docx

3. Share and explain something you’ve found in your research hunt for good sources. I like this one for its visuals and currency: https://digital-competence.eu/front/what-is-digital-competence/  (Links to an external site.)

 (Links to an external site.)4. Share a rough outline of your Lit Review: I’m going to study 3 sections, including History/Background, Controversies, and the Role of Communication in Digital Technology Competency before concluding with Current Trends. How are you dividing up your Lit Review? 

RESPONSES

Dr. PC

Dr. PC

Jul 1, 2019 Jul 1 at 10:11pm

Preview the document

PS: Don’t forget to view/read the PPT for Week 2. It describes the details on the format and content for your rough draft and can be found here: 490 Week 2.pptx Tyler Erickson

Tyler Erickson

Jul 2, 2019 Jul 2 at 10:37pm

1. Going through the OWL workshops was interesting to me because i have never learned APA style writing, i have always used MLA format. Another thing that will be an adjustment for me in the in text citations, because i have not done a lot of that either and for APA it looks a little bit different. It is good to know we have a resource in the OWL workshop to help us through. 

2. The rubric is a really good thing to look at before the writing assignment so you can cater your writing towards it. Ten pages is obviously a lot but it is broken up in different sections so that should make it easier, as long as i stay on top of it. 

3.  Here is one of the articles i found for problem solving and critical thinking. I like it because there are some lists that are easy to read of great tips on how to do these skills. 

https://www.dol.gov/odep/topics/youth/softskills/Problem.pdf (Links to an external site.)

4. My out line i am going to talk about problem solving skills, and then critical thinking skills, and then talk about how they go off of each other and how they can help you in the real world.  Dr. PC

Dr. PC

Jul 3, 2019 Jul 3 at 3:20pm

Reply Reply to Comment Collapse Subdiscussion Tony Gonzales

Tony Gonzales

Jul 2, 2019 Jul 2 at 10:30am

  1. I went through most of the links at the OWL workshop site. Specifically the ones that narrowed the focus on aspects of APA I was unfamiliar with. My most glaring weakness in the APA format has always been in-text citation; when and where to add the relevant cited author and when a block quote is appropriate. The workshop addressed these concerns I had and will be a valuable resource when composing the rough draft and the final.
  2. The ten-page minimum might sound intimidating if assessed abstractly. It was to me, at any rate. But, I think once broken down and compartmentalized into its Lit Review sections, it becomes significantly less of a monolith. My only concerns might be who exactly to track down for an interview and if they can conducted via email or over the phone. Summer session means campus is relatively deserted of instructors and staff.
  3. Something fascinating about my preliminary research into the Work Ethic/Professionalism competency is how closely it is tied to the appreciation you have for your current position. If you’re not satisfied with what you’re doing, there will be a marked lessening of your work ethic in respect to that job. This site: https://www.wikihow.com/Answer-What-Is-Your-Work-Ethic (Links to an external site.) , while not exactly a good place to reference for a paper (lack of external citations), provides some starting points for further research. The work ethic/job satisfaction dichotomy is addressed multiple times in this article.
  4. Rough Outline of Lit Review: History of Work Ethic/Professionalism Standards, Employer/Employee perceptions of Work Ethic, Work Ethic/Job Satisfaction intersection, Controversies about Work Ethic Standards, Conclusion
  • Hi Tony, I’m excited about your discovery re: the connection between job satisfaction and the decline of work ethic! What a concept–it really suggests that employers who want employees with solid work ethics have some responsibility for ensuring those employees are satisfied with what they’re doing! Your Lit Review slices look solid, though–like Tyler and Cassandra–you’re going to have to deal with why this is a “dual competency.” Why is professionalism connected to work ethic? Are they the same? If so, to whom? We might want to assume that they are part of the same dynamic, but they can definitely be defined as separate competencies. Maybe your history/context piece will flesh that out? I’m looking forward to seeing what else you discover. 🙂    

Reply Reply to Comment Collapse Subdiscussion Cassandra Payne

Cassandra Payne

Jul 2, 2019 Jul 2 at 9:29pm

When going thorough the owl workshop it helped clarify the way I am supposed to format and how to do it correctly. I thought I was doing these things right because I have never really been taught the correct way of doing it. I like that it explained a lot of different sides of APA and why we use it. I think as college kids we haven’t really taken the time to sit down and understand APA and the importance of it, we just do it because it is what the teacher asks of us. It made it more clear for me and I feel as if I understand it much better now.
I feel as if the rubric seems like a lot when you first look at it but when it comes down to it we just have to make sure that we hold ourselves accountable and make sure the work gets done and with it being broken down into sections I think we can get it done. It always seems impossible until its done. I think it will be time consuming and difficult in some aspects but I think I and my classmates can get the job done. I think it seems a little scary with it being so much in such a short amount of time. With the interviews I think that will be the biggest struggle and making sure you are formulating the right questions to be asked. As well as finding the right people.
The research on global and intercultural fluency is pretty sparse, they pretty much all say the same thing. But I did find an article that stood out to me and that I was interested in. https://news.illinoisstate.edu/2019/03/intercultural-fluency-a-critical-soft-skill-in-todays-global-world/
This article talks about how intercultural fluency is a critical soft skill that we need to possess in today’s society makes us understand individuals’ differences and helps us interact respectfully. More and more cooperation’s work and interact with people on a global level and we must be able to communicate effectively.
4. Rough outline: Global and intercultural fluency. I am doing my article on The high impact of education abroad: College students’ engagement in international experiences and the development of intercultural competencies. I am going to be looking at the history of studying abroad and students participation, and self reflection throughout their time studying abroad, and if this helped them in their future when it came time for their career. I want to look at the pros and cons of studying abroad and see in what ways it effects their future.

  • Hi Cassandra, The study abroad idea is brilliant! I’m looking forward to seeing your coverage of that. I do think you’ll need to expand to include at least two other literature review components, so that you cover the Global/Intercultural Fluency competency comprehensively. There are other things students can do to gain that competency, yes? Not everyone will study abroad, but everyone can take classes and/or participate in EWU’s annual Diversity/Inclusion Week (which includes an entire host of activities and opportunities, along with free food and tee shirts and panels and workshops and multiple avenues for strengthening Global/Intercultural Fluency.) This is a tricky competency, but so important. For example, Communication Studies offers TWO classes, CMST 340 Intercultural Communication and CMST 440 Global Communication–which also count as part of the University’s Global and Diversity requirement for all Eastern students. The fact that every student has to have a Global AND a Diversity requirement really tells you how much academics value it–and that they see them as separate things. But, there is a reason NACE lists it as the 8th most essential competency–which tells you there is controversy, tension, something out of sync relative to how we value it in Higher Ed versus how employers value it. The latter *do* value it, but maybe in different ways and for different reasons? They might see them as the same thing? Eastern doesn’t. You’ll need to flesh that out. Your coverage of study abroad is not wrong; in fact, it’s right on target. You just need to expand your Literature Review to include at least two other “parts of the conversation” on developing Global and Intercultural Fluency, defined by NACE as the ability to “Value, respect, and learn from diverse cultures, races, ages, genders, sexual orientations, and religions. The individual demonstrates, openness, inclusiveness, sensitivity, and the ability to interact respectfully with all people and understand individuals’ differences.” I do know some people (no one in this class, surely) who travel to faraway places and come back no richer for their experience relative to Global and Intercultural Fluency. So, while Studying Abroad is one option, it has to be done in such a way that fluency is truly achieved. That’s a controversy, too, especially because it takes a lot of money to study abroad and may not deliver the competence students need in the workplace or in the world at large. SO MUCH to explore here, so I am hoping your interest in travel and exploring new places will lead you to think of this competency as “new ground” to become an expert in. : ) ALSO, and this is for everyone: you will find that “soft skill” is one of many terms used to describe the competencies. Some people want to call them “interpersonal skills,” but that doesn’t cover critical thinking or digital technology as well. For our purposes, we will be referring to them as ESSENTIAL SKILLS in our manual. NACE calls them “requisite competencies,” which just has too many syllables for my liking. 🙂  Edited by Dr. PC on Jul 3 at 3:09pm

Reply Reply to Comment Collapse Subdiscussion Dr. PC

Dr. PC

Jul 3, 2019 Jul 3 at 2:39pm

Hello all, getting some really good questions both here and via email. Let me share some basics as we move forward:

INTERVIEWS: First, the QUESTIONS: The questions for each of the 3 interviews will be provided, though you can add to them if desired. You can talk by phone or exchange emails, whichever works best for the person you’re interviewing. We start on these next week.

3 INTERVIEWEES:

(1) You will be assigned a person in Career Services to talk with about your competency. Each staff member has identified their “favorites” and will be available next week to take calls and/or exchange emails.

(2) For employers, it’s important to identify someone now who would be a good resource to talk about your competency. No limits on the type of industry, the location of the employer, whether you know them or not, whether they are related to your dream job or not. IDEALLY, you should tap someone who can give you good quotes and a helpful perspective about the importance of your competency in the workplace; this suggests that you might know them or about them, at least a little.

(3) For locating faculty, this might seem difficult in the summer. Flexibility will help here, too, as you can identify a faculty member from any 2-year or 4-year institution, anywhere in the U.S. I would strongly recommend it be a faculty member you’ve had a class with before, but you want someone who can give an EDUCATOR’S perspective (versus an employer’s) on the competency and how it is taught, what classes/exercises help students to learn it, why it is important for students to learn while in college, etc. Start thinking now about the ideal faculty member you’d like to contact for this.

You will get a script with questions and relevant consent forms for each interview, so your job should be to focus on the WHO (employers and faculty) more than the WHAT OR HOW at this point. The WHO is done for you with the Career Center, which I recommend should be your first interview (because they are helpful with how to approach employers and faculty). I am working with them now to locate faculty and employers on campus, so that we might have a list to choose from. More on that later. 

We will focus on the interviews next week as part of our “education” theme. That should help you focus this week on “research” and getting the best online (not academic, necessarily) resources that you can defend as quality work. I’m really glad you’re getting something out of the APA workshop–the OWL at Purdue has long been a reliable and helpful resource for me that I visit frequently. 🙂 Edited by Dr. PC on Jul 3 at 2:44pm Reply Reply to Comment Collapse Subdiscussion Kylie Maycumber

Kylie Maycumber

Jul 3, 2019 Jul 3 at 6:59pm 1) I really liked the powerpoint slide presentation and found it very beneficial, The powerpoint, along with the presentation cleared up many of the questions I had. I did not know that sometimes its necessary  to be more personal by saying ‘we’ instead of “the authors conducted”. I have always had some questions on citing within APA formatted papers (like when to include the author in an in text citation vs in the parenthesis) and the powerpoint really helped clear that up. 2) I think the rubric is great to look at prior to the assignment so that you can assure you’re meeting the necessary requirements in order to earn the grade you want. 3) Though we have already looked at something with NACE competencies, there is an article that I REALLY want to read titled ‘Embedding Career Management Competency Into Curricula- NACE’, but I am having trouble opening the webpage. With that being said, if anyone else is able to open it I would love to know if its just my computer(s) or the link. The other link I have is Chapter 5 titled “Embedding Career Competencies in Learning and Talent Development”
Though the article could be  considered possibly excessive because of how much information in it, I think Chapter 5 has a lot of  important information.

Click to access 1edbf726af219b921dc5f6037415ce245acd.pdf


4) The sections I want to include are history/context of career management,   controversies, its role in communication, and analogy of ranking of importance (possibly incorporated into thesis). I would love to include different ways to reach full potential regarding career management.

Hi Kylie! I had trouble getting the page to open, then went to a cached version and copy/pasted what I found into a word document. See if this is what you wanted? (see attached).

Some of the references are hard to access, too. I was able to get to this one (Links to an external site.), though, which is something I hear a lot about: the differences between student perceptions of their competency compared to employers who are “dubious.” I’m not really appreciating the employer perspective on new grads here–it seems so dismissive. Kinda like saying that all college prepares you for is to write “20 page papers on the color blue.” We could do without that attitude. I wonder if the employers who express things like this have…been to college? It sure doesn’t seem like it. 😦   I understand that students shouldn’t overestimate their competence, but neither should employers be so dismissive and denigrating. *ugh* Edited by Dr. PC on Jul 3 at 7:53pm Embedding Career Management Competency Into Curricula cached version.docx Dr. PC

Dr. PC

Jul 3, 2019 Jul 3 at 7:57pm

And, Kylie! I think your list of Literature Review “slices” is spot on. I’m excited to see what you find on ways to reach competence relative to career management! Dr. PC

Dr. PC

Jul 3, 2019 Jul 3 at 8:03pm

  • One more thing, I think the OWL PPT Kylie is referring to (above) is attached here to keep in your own computers as a handy reference. OWL workshop ppt on APA basics.ppt

Reply Reply to Comment Collapse Subdiscussion Lauren Blazekovic

Lauren Blazekovic

Jul 3, 2019 Jul 3 at 8:09pm

1. Purdue Owl is a source I have used since my freshman year of college. I have had several professors suggest this site as a tool to ensure proper formatting. I always find myself going to this site when I am not entirely sure how to format my writing. I like that it gives an overview and detail of each style and format of writing. 

2. Ten pages does seem like a lot, but I think dividing it into sections is a great way to get thorough and complete work. I took a class last quarter with a similar assignment, where the final paper was several pages, but it was broken down into several mini assignments. This is really helpful for me because it allows me to focus on each aspect of the assignment and it makes it much less stressful. The interviewing part of the assignment will be fairly easy for me to complete because I have taken a few interviewing classes already. I am excited to take the skills I have learned from those classes and apply them to this class. 

3. I found this article on written/oral communication that defines the importance of written communication and how to effectively communicate over writing, since we do so much of our communication through writing today. I typically use the EWU library database to find reliable sources when conducting research because there are a lot of great academic journals to read. 

.https://bizfluent.com/about-6690331-importance-effective-written-communication.html (Links to an external site.)

4. Rough outline: I want to separate oral and written communication and discover the importance of each of them in the workplace and when applying for jobs. Written and oral communication are two different skills and both are important. For me, I have a much easier time communicating through writing because it gives me more time to thoroughly think about what points I need to get across and how I should word them. Oral communication is a little more pressure because it forces you to think on the spot. I will be discovering the employee and employer perspectives on both written and oral communication and putting them together to find the overall effectiveness of each skill when applying/interviewing to a new job as well as the importance of them in the workplace. 

Lauren, really well done!You sound like you’re ready to go and well-versed in the parts and pieces of the rough draft report. Really looking forward to seeing you make the most of what you’ve already learned and leverage it for the sake of future students. I completely agree that written and oral communication are two different animals in many ways, and I’m hoping you can give us a bit of history, too, about how the two have switched places in terms of importance over time. We are definitely in a more text-driven culture these days, and that makes written skills all the more important. Still, public speaking is often most Americans’ greatest fear, so having that skill and being competent on your feet is definitely a value to the workplace, wherever you go. 🙂 Dr. PC

Dr. PC

Jul 3, 2019 Jul 3 at 8:58pm

  • I’ll check back intermittently between now and midnight. Please feel free to leave questions or comments as needed, right in the Discussion. I will continue to draft my piece and I hope you’ll do the same as we head toward Sunday. Discussion 4 will open Friday morning, and there may be another explanatory PPT/video if I get a chance to put it together with some of the stuff I’m finding for the draft–just in case that might be helpful to you to have a template of sorts. I’m still eager to hear from all of you how to weight the particular parts of the evaluation rubric, so that moves to Sunday for completion. Please give it some thought. 🙂 Edited by Dr. PC on Jul 3 at 9pm

Reply Reply to Comment Collapse Subdiscussion Heather Hall

Heather Hall

Jul 3, 2019 Jul 3 at 10:51pm

1. I honestly had to go through the workshops thoroughly as I am not really familiar with the APA writing style as I am with MLA. I really appreciated the segment on the general APA guidelines as I find even MLA format to be difficult sometimes so it was nice to find articles that will essentially help articulate the content within your paper. I found it incredibly helpful that there was a section on APA Stylistics and things that we need to avoid especially the subsegment on finding alternative descriptors to professionalize the content within a paper.


2. The rubric can be daunting with a minimum page requirement of ten pages, but I think it can be feasible if you can stretch the content out appropriately. I honestly can anticipate struggling with the page requirement because I am unsure of the direction I want to take on my report topic. Another thing that might be difficult for some is the scheduling of interviews due to things such as the amount of staff presence for interview purposes, (especially trying to coordinate a solid line of communication for those of us off campus), finding employers who have the time for interviews, and availability of career center staff so that there is not overlap in interviews. Thankfully, you gave us a kind of general outline on how to prepare/format our paper, so we have a generalized idea on how to lay it out.


3. https://www.smartsheet.com/collaborative-teamwork – I like this article because it talks about the importance of how the entities are their own and separate from one another, yet they connect in a way that provides a strong network. I also liked the visual that used an arrow to distinguish how the terminology has different connotations and how they differ in the levels of purpose. It also covers an important topic of what it means to have good communication, especially within the workplace.


4. I am going to cover the content that is expected within the paper such as the history/background, current trends, controversies/alternate perspectives, examples/case studies/etc., and I am going to cover why it is important to have teamwork and collaboration in the workplace and the benefits of having a strong team in the workplace. Also, I am going to talk about what it means to building the right workplace climate within the workplace.

  • Hi Heather, it sounds like you also have a good strategy. The 3 areas I included are not required, just recommended. But, I think they would work well to be as comprehensive as possible in the report on teamwork and collaboration. Are you are right to focus on the distinctions and relationship between teamwork and collaboration.  Next week’s interviews will be their own kind of intensity, but I will provide as much direction and resources as I can to allow you to focus on your research this week.  Do you think I should weight the content of your draft as the heaviest out of 80 points? Or, would you recommend another approach? 

Reply Reply to Comment Collapse Subdiscussion Tajha Briggs

Tajha Briggs

Jul 7, 2019 Jul 7 at 10:49pm

    1. To be honest, I didn’t quite understand why we needed to ready APA style guidelines. It wasn’t until I started reading the first intro paragraph of the workshop, that I realized I don’t even know what APA stands for. I now know it stands for American Psychological Association. This OWL workshop is something I think all students should review each quarter, we all are very familiar with MLA, but I think we over look or push of actually trying APA format.
    2. I think the lit review rubric looks very good. Everything your grading us on and expecting of us, is just as they would when we write or lit review in our English 201 course. By this time this should be a refresher for most of us.
    3. Something I found when doing my research was that you have to be very precise with your wording. We can’t just type anything because every article, tweet, news feed, or whatever it maybe that has been published with one of those words you searched will show up, leaving you with like 2300 results. Me personally, I like to stick with the EWU library research data base that offers things like ProQuest where you can filter your search criteria’s.
    4. For the rough draft of my outline Lit Review: I am going to study the importance of a good work ethic. Examining the history and theory to see if it’s true that a good work ethic could make or break your progression in the professional world.
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