Diego V

[cnrodz-blog]

Week 4: Reading Response

During this weeks reading response I will be responding the Norton Field Guide chapter 58. This chapter is about how to create the most effective way to give a speech. It tells the speaker to have a clear stucture in order to help the audience follow along without getting confused with so much information. Also use signpost language when jumping from one point to the next. When speaking it tells us that our tone is important we have to be confident and have a more academic tone. Along with how we speak it says that powerpoint can also be a good tool to enhance our presentation

This information was important to know because it helped me with my presention during class. I also hope to carry these techniques outside of the classroom in the future. It taught me how to approach a certain audience depending on genre and stance of my speech. The reading assignment taught me how to properly make slides for a presentation without making everything cluttered. Also states how to a person should stand in order to perceive a speaker as confidence and formal. Many of these tips seems to be small however, it can have a huge impact on your speech. 

I know that will be properly prepared next time present a speech. Whether it’s during my academic career at UTEP or in my profession after college. I want all my speeches to have the audiences attention from beginning to end and I believe this chapter was the key to having the perfect speech.

[dvelazquez4utep]

Hey man! Really enjoyed reading your post. The topic you chose to write about was similar to mine about how to effectively convey your messages in speeches/presentations. I liked the techniques you mentioned on how to actually better your speech to attract the audience. Go read my post about the presentations so you can have an even better understanding of presentations. You mentioned it a little on how presenting a speech you will be properly prepared but I wish you spoke more onto your major and how it really can benefit in your field of study.

I used this gif to represent a wonderful leader who made great speeches. Maybe you could have linked your major by telling us a time when you had to give a speech. Hopefully it was worthy of dropping the mic. You could have mentioned how this reading helped you during our last presentation to communicate better. Maybe even ask us a question of what you’re wondering after reading the NFG page. One question I have and I can’t wrap my head around it, why did you use the Spongebob gif? Hopefully you have a good explanation haha. Anyhow, you did a great job on reflecting the main theme of the author, just wish you could have gone more into detail!

On another note, pretty sad this class ended. Wish everyone who is reading this a great summer and a great fall semester. 

[dvelazquez4utep]

Week 4 Reading Response

This final week I chose to read the article “Talking Head to Rock Star.” Not gonna lie, I only chose it because the title seemed cool and would probably be an interesting read. I was definitely right on this one. This article talks about the overall aspect of presentation and how to conquer presentations and be a rock star when speaking and performing such presentation.

I chose the above gif because it represents the rockstar you want to be like. It shows that you need to be confident when leading or speaking in front of an audience. Presentations are a clear way to understand how to effectively convey your message through certain types of communication. This topic mainly ties back to my Engineering major as I have many Engineering classes where I have to effectively communicate with my peers to resolve problems and maintain a close relation so no future problems arise. I plan to be making presentations later down my career and reading this article about being prepared, knowing who is going to be there beforehand can all help you to communicate to your audience better. 

The gif above shows a person presenting a certain material and use effective communication channels through body language to convey their message. This article made me have a more robust understanding in my major courses as it helps me understand that we need to speak around the presentation. Use the visuals as supporting material and not the other way around. The reading actually helped me immensely when it came to doing our final presentations for the class as I grabbed all the knowledge I could from this post to help me speak better during the final presentation. Finally, the questions I still wonder is why does this type of communication get a better response to the audience? Hopefully someone can answer that below! Thank You! 

[cnrodz-blog]

Week 3 - Designing Text

This week I will be discussing designing text from the NFG. It shows us how to get an audience to read text using various strategies such as keeping it simple, balanced, consistent, and use colors to your advantage. When designing text we still think about purpose, audience, genre, and stance. This helps us see which route to take when trying to capture audiences attention. Designing text takes creativity and a clear vision on what your trying to accomplish. Everying that is placed on a designed text should have a purpose in order to tie the writing and pictures together. 

Although designing text is new to us, it has been around for a while. Look at this Coca-Cola advertisement. It shows a Military man drinking coke, which attracts the audence of all men saying Coca-Cola is for Strong men. The stance of this advertisement is that Coca-Cola is great for you, don’t you see the big smile on that man. The Picture is simple and uses the color red to focus on the word “Coca-Cola. 

Until this chapter I never realized how often designing text was used though our daily life. This McDonalds advertisement brings humor ]]and makes the audence was to read the small text. This advertisement uses humor, color and even a good looking burger to attract people to McDonalds. It’s amazing how when designing text is done correctly it can make a huge impact on someone perspective. 

[dvelazquez4utep]

Hey man! I found your post very interesting. I did my post about something else but I also read the NFG out designing text. I agree with you how we can grab the audience attention by changing the text whether its changing the colors vibrancy, size, etc. The examples you provided were excellent as you actually provided the reasoning behind the designing text. 

One thing I didn’t see was how you can tie the designing text back to your major or the assignment we are currently doing. You could have spoken about how we are trying to grab the audience attention with our Infographs. I don’t know your major but strategies when it comes to designing text is useful in any major. It can be used to grab lots of people’s attention. Finally I wonder what question you are asking yourself when it comes to this topic. 

You did a great job man! Just wished you answered some of the questions about the topic pertaining to your major, hopefully you can add that! Great Job again!

[dvelazquez4utep]

WEEK 3 READING RESPONSE

I chose to read the article, “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change”. After reading the article the author really conveys his main theme of how the community lacks interest in public discourses. He lists solutions of how we can become better and overall increase participation in such communities. One of his solutions was to “bridge” the universities and communities through activism. “Activism is the action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about social change” (Dictionary G., 2017)  The paper is trying to present alternative methods to create and influence social change. 

Social change to me is the transformation of culture, social institutions, and social structure over time. The reason I chose this image is because it represents the discourse communities within everyone. The social change would combine everyone. 

This image to me represents the role of each person can be when it comes to social change. People can play different types of role to seek social change. Going back to the article, this ties back to my engineering major because we as a community can create big differences and come together as a discourse community. Just like social change, engineers work together to create more innovations. The reading helped me understand the community problem report we are doing right now because it helped me make an understanding of activism and social change and how we can tie everyone closer together just like we are trying to do with our topic of gender diversity in engineering. Just like Ellen Cushman said “The roads into the communities aren’t paved with yellow bricks and sometimes may seem unapproachable, but access can generally be gained  with observation.” The challenges are there but I really wish I could ask the question of how do we get better relations with people to access communities. The article really opened my eyes to many things. Look forward to next week’s reading!

[dvelazquez4utep]

Diego Velazquez, Armando Gutierrez, Dedrick Simpson

[mycsquinones-blog]

Week 2 Reading Response

In this week I chose the reading of  “It wasn’t me, was it?” Plagiarism and the Web by Dànielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati. Plagiarism has been practiced for a long time. Even before they called it plagiarism people would steal other people’s work and call it their own. This has affected our education system. It was harder to check for plagiarism in schools before computers and the internet came to the market, because unless you know exactly from what book they got a sentence from it was hard to determine if it was original work or not. Now that we have all of that in our disposition it is easier to plagiarize, but it is also easier to check for plagiarism.

I am in college and this is a strict rule that the college has in not stealing other people’s work. In the best case scenario, the professor would just give me a 0 as a grade for the assignment if I plagiarized. Now they actually can suspend you from the class and even the college and have a bad mark on your record or school resume. 

The reading brings and awareness and also a reminder to myself that plagiarism is serious and affects your education in a negative way, because plagiarizing is basically not doing the work. Right now we are doing a lot of essays with a lot of outside sources and with a small amount of time that citing and referencing gets triky. Many students plagiarize by accident because they don’t know how to cite correctly or they make a mistake when referencing and giving credit, but it is still counted against them, because mistakes do happen.

The reading makes you ask questions like “Why do students plagiarize?” “How can we promote that plagiarism is bad so students won’t do it anymore?” “How does plagiarism affect the learning process?”

I chose the GIF with the books to represent how much books you would have to look through to check if something was plagiarized back when computers didn’t exist. The Batman GIF is a satire of not needing rules to live better, which you do, if not you can get expelled from college for plagiarism and I like Batman too. I put the Steve Harvey picture because even a successful TV host can make a really bad mistake like announcing the wrong winner for Mrs. Universe. 

[dvelazquez4utep]

Hey man! How’s it going. I wanted to do my response from reading your post because it related to my Tumblr post. We both read the plagiarism article and I believe we both share the same thought process when it comes to it.  I couldn’t agree more when you stated that it has affected our education system. Our education board has greatly suffered from plagiarism as students are creating a false hope of who they really are. 

Plagiarism is a big part of Universities everywhere. Just like you said, students can get expelled or suspended which can ultimately end your academic career. I made the same point in my post about how we need to be careful when it comes to citing sources and generally talking about other peoples work. If not cited correctly or not cited at all we can end up with a bad case of plagiarism and we all certainly do not want that. On another note I believe I can answer one of your questions pertaining to why students plagiarize. Some students out there are lazy and don’t feel like reading or writing anything so they go for other methods of accomplishing tasks for example, copying someones work. As for the other question if anyone else would like to chime in, that would be great! Overall, great post man!

[dvelazquez4utep]

Week 2 Reading Response

This week I chose to do my response on the article on blackboard “It wasn’t me, was it?” Plagiarism and the Web by Danielle DeVoss & Annette C. Rosati. I mainly chose this article because I personally have been accused of plagiarizing, falsely accused but still a scary process. The main idea of this article was to inform people about plagiarism and how some people have no clue if they did in fact plagiarize as they are scared if they did something wrong or forgot to cite a part of their work. 

This gif is perfect to my standard because it is showing “homer” as scared showcasing that’s how most students feel when they plagiarize. The content from the article ties back to my major as I currently attend a University. Most universities take plagiarism very serious and can be a daunting thing to hurt your academic record.  I have been on the other end of the dishonesty policy and while I was falsely accused, it’s still a very scary thing to go through. Plagiarism is no joke and everyone should be careful to not commit such foul especially in college like UTEP. The article gave me a better understanding on how people think plagiarism works and how people are not sure if they indeed plagiarized. I feel like professors should take the time to inform kids of what exactly plagiarism is and what does not fall under that category. The major assignment we are currently working on should be taken with caution as we are dealing with lots of writing, from scholarly, open and multimodal sources. We want to make we provide the correct citations and not forget to cite valuable things as that can land us in potential trouble. Even though Ms. Cisneros is the best I have no doubt she won’t hesitate to assign a zero as plagiarism is a very serious offense. 

I chose this gif because I feel that it shows a sort of punishment comes to the student who decides to copy work without properly citing the original author. Trust me, this punishment is much better than the actual punishments Universities assign. Ultimately, the article prompts me to ask what can we possibly do to inform students on what is plagiarism and what is not considered and how we can encourage students to not plagiarize but to do their own work. Those questions are the ones that popped up into my head when I first read the article. 

[brandonramirez9-blog]

Week 1: Reading Response

The best way i can interpret the article is basically, Activity theories are used to understand how people interact, and engage learning in all kinds of activities. It does it in three major steps, 1) Accounting for aspects 2) Analyzing how it works 3) Isolating problems to develop solutions. Activity Theory is basically used as lens to directly analyze an Activity Theory, which is a group of people working together to achieve a common goal. 

An activity system always consists on a who, what, when, where, why, and how. It also always has a series of conventions. Activity systems are always adapting, as people are constantly working together move forward, innovating, and promoting change. 

Activity theories can be directly tied down to the field i am currently directed in (Medical Field). Surgeons often work together during operations to save a patients life. Surgeons are also divided into different fields, in order to be more effective when treating patients. Surgeons are also required to renew their licenses, by attending training sessions, in which they learn new techniques and procedures developed by surgeons themselves, in order to treat wounds more effectively, and combat infections more thoroughly. Medical researchers also work side to side with doctors, as they are always working together to discover new cures for diseases, treatments, and antidotes. Nurses also play a very critical role in the medical field, as they are basically the surgeons handyman. Society often discriminates nurses, often not considering them important, however it is thanks to them that surgeons are able to remain focused and getting the job done effectively. Like an Activity System, medicine is all about working together, and moving forward as a whole 

[dvelazquez4utep]

Hey Brandon!

I would like to start off saying that I read the same article about activity systems and let me say that I definitely agree with you. When you stated that Activity Theory is “a group of people working together to achieve a common goal.” I had the same type of response when I read that article. If you refer back to my reading response I noted that a team can be an activity system as they are trying to reach a common goal. Just like soccer activity systems apply to your major also made perfect sense as surgeons do indeed work together to help patients.

Maybe you should add the tools and rules surgeons have to use and follow. It ties back to activity systems like my major is Engineering and I related the work to our activity system. Just trying to give you some tips I think would make the reader understand more:)

Overall great read and loved how you tied it back to your major. One thing I do wonder is what question does the reading prompt you to ask? Would love to hear back! 

[dvelazquez4utep]

Week 1: Reading Response

The main themes that are discussed in this article are activity theory and its integration into activity systems. Activity theory is described as looking at a situation or object, and processing it in different ways. This can be done by “thinking outside the box” or “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.” Furthermore, activity systems are groups of people that work together to accomplish one overall goal. These groups of people focus on a long term goal that will be accomplished over time, using tools to guide them along the way. This process is directed by specific instructions and division of labor in order to ensure the desired outcome. More explicitly, activity systems are ongoing, object-directed, historically conditioned, dialectically structured, tool-mediated, and involve human interactions.

The reason I chose this gif is because a soccer team illustrates an activity system. The teams use human interaction in order to achieve one goal. Tools are rules are used in such sport. An activity system is created here

As an Engineering major this article connects to my profession by creating a visual effect on how there is many different levels of engineering but how each one can trickle down into totally different professions. The article helps me understand the concept of engineering as a whole community as each major within the Engineering college use different tools and rules. Ultimately each major has their own purpose to fulfill. The impact of special language can be different from major to major. Even though most engineers are well versed in software programs, some students may wonder what a mechanical engineering program such as NX differs from an industrial engineering program.

The gif above demonstrates an activity system in my engineering profession.

Finally a question the article has me itching for is can an activity system survive without human interaction?

[dvelazquez4utep]

Week 1 Intro

Happy Summer 2017! My name is Diego Velazquez, I am a student just like you enrolled in this summer RWS 2017 course. Here’s a little post to get to know me well. Lets get started!

I was born and raised in El Paso, TX. My mom and dad were both born in Chihuahua. I love everything about El Paso besides  the hot weather. If I had a choice, I would love to live in somewhere really cold, preferably Colorado. Lets get back on track about me, I am currently 20 years old, I love to hang out with friends, play basketball and play professional paintball. Here’s a good example of the type of paintball I play :)

I have played locally and around the world, I have won prizes and trophies at paintball tournaments with my team. I feel like paintball is my true passion as it helps me build very well team building and communication skills. Overall, lets just say I like sports.

I play basketball on my free time

#Simpsons #Basketball #WarriorsBlew3-1Lead

Enough about sports, lets move onto what I do when I am not playing any kind of sport activity. I mainly go to school, work and watch Netflix when I can:)

Please just agree The Office is hilarious #funny

When Im not laughing my (explicit) ass* off, I am mainly working. I currently work at Chick-Fil-A on Mesa Street. I have been working there for around 3 years since our grand opening. I am a team leader and honestly I can say that I love my job. Not only is the food great It has taught me so many things in terms of customer service and overall elevating my language. I truly can say I <3 my job!  

On my academic level, I attend The University of Texas at El Paso, I am studying to be a Mechanical Engineer. I want to hopefully get my bachelors degree in ME and graduate by 2019. I am currently a sophomore, let me tell you about my experiences during college. I seriously underestimated the amount of the work and effort it takes to be an engineer, my first year was a breeze but that’s only because I was doing my basics and not actually taking any advanced engineering course like I am now. #TakeMeBackToFreshmenYear

For anyone looking to come to UTEP, I recommend you seriously do it! Its a great school for your academics and certainly a very friendly campus with clubs and events being a very good thing here :) You wont regret it!

Im currently saddened to say that I don’t have much community involvement in El Paso. Don’t really follow much besides my routine of school and work. I usually don’t have time.

Onto other things I actually want to share with you guys something a little interesting about myself. I am a very active entrepreneur. I am always looking to start businesses. I am actually on the verge of creating my own El Paso Residential Cleaning Service, the name of my company is CleanKnight. Our slogan is “Your Home.Your Castle”

Our company provides residential cleaning service with quality vetted workers. We are insured and bonded so we always try to satisfy the customer. We are barely launching but everything so far has sailed very smoothly. This is our company logo...

I very much appreciate any feedback on the website I currently run, I don’t mind to brag but I do say the website is very clean looking and straight to action. You guys should check it out if you get the chance.

SEO: https://cleanknight.com

Well that’s about it for me, I have explained my life and how I handle my things as far as my personal, professional, academic and civic life go. Look forward to seeing everyone’s posts and working with you in class. Everyone have a great summer!

p.s. - i love RWS1301 and Audrey Cisneros........extra credit points..maybe? ha

[audreyfay]

#Week 1: Intro

Happy Spring Everyone! My name is Audrey, I am your instructor and I’m excited to get to know all of you. This Intro Post assignment is the first step in that direction and here’s a chance for you to get to know a little about me as well.

I’m an El Paso native, born and raised in EPT/Ciudad Juarez, and I love it here. I have a son—Daniel, who is the smartest, kindest, sweetest, funniest, most handsome thing to arrive on planet earth. Through him, I’ve also learned that the best kind of entertainment is the kind you get when people think no one is watching. For example…

Much of my life surrounds school and Danny—aka Peanut. (He acts like he hates that I call him that, but I know he loves it). But I try and make space for me: I run regularly and lift often.

I salsa! #Salsera #Dancetilyoudrop

And I love soccer. Liga MX, La Liga, English Premier League, Champions League, Bundesliga, Serie A, MLS, and so on and so on and so on.

I strive to achieve life GOALS, estilo Neymar Jr.

I have a BA in Political Science, an MA in Rhetoric and Writing, a Graduate Certificate in Intelligence and National Security, and I’m wrapping up my PhD in Rhetoric and Composition.

My humanitarian and activists efforts center on freedom and justice for Palestine. #EndTheOccupation #PeaceforPalestine

In my time here as a PhD student, I have focused on rhetoric and resistance. I’m currently researching big data and social impact—think Twitter conversations and what they mean to society, people, governments, and social movements. I argue that the discourse happening on social media gives us the chance to understand real people, real desires, and can offer lots of opportunities for shared knowledge and lead the way to diplomatic, counterinsurgency, and peace building efforts worldwide. So I’m basically trying to be this guy.

I’m also researching issues of diversity and disparity among marginalized populations in various ways, like diversity among minorities and women in Higher Education. I ask questions like who’s in power, where is our voice, our place in our fields, in our jobs, in our societies, and why does it all matter?

Soon you too will have some new insight into the current state of minorities in your fields in higher education. Why do YOU think researching a topic like this matters?

[audreyfay]

Audrey’s Intro! Week 1

[audreyfay]

Mrs. Cisneros’ Intro is LIT, if I do say so myself. 

[audreyfay]

My Intro, again. Also, check out the required #hashtags. (semester, course, week#, theme) #CAKE

[dvelazquez4utep]

Diego Velazquez

dvelazquez4utep