Emoticons as a another route of non-verbal communication

I'm going to tackle now something appart from class but has to do with communication: Emoticons.

Back when the first cell phones were made and when Messenger appeared, something new was created: Emoticons. Those are faces that represent people's emotional status. There were two types: On the cell phones, people normally used some alphabetic symbols that readed, looked like a face. For example: :-) . The two dots represents the eyes, the dash a nose and the closed bracket the mouth. That means that person is smiling. On Messenger, on the other hand, were actually faces that were shown when you wrote the legend

The legend of the default emoticons on Messenger. Source

They had a huge impact on the new communication devices made in that time, so much that we're still using then those days. Several web pages were made in order to download more emoticons on Messenger and it was normal to find names with emoticons. People always tend to use them to express their feelings, emotions, to write shorter, to be sarcastic or ironic, etc. When you're not facing a person it's easy sometimes to know how are they, but now when using distant communication, so the emoticons are an excellent tool that hans't passed away yet.

Gestures, a vital piece of communication

In this class the secretary didn't prepare the class, so we moved quickly. This day the teacher talked about communication, that not always is the direct language the most important one when it comes talking about anything.

Just like last week, we watched another video, this time of a person giving a speech on a wedding twice. The first time he never made a gesture and was reading the paper's speech all the time. The second time, he was moving from right to left, making pauses, smiling, making a joke, pointing at the married couple... This was an example about how you should make a speech and how not to. In my opinion, is a big difference between the two of them and I realized that is very important to know how to talk in public.

Later, the teacher sent us an activity in pairs. First, we choose a quote from a pdf and tell it to our partner. Then I have to write about how he spoke, like gestures, eye-contact, etc; then we do the opposite thing. Later, we tell a childhood memory and do the same thing with the quotes.

This activity took me 20 minutes to do so.

I'll leave a video so you can see how important is the communication when it comes to give an emotional speech.

First class of Communication Skills

This is the first post for Communication Skills class. Somedays I'm going to write posts about what we do in class.

In every class, some student plays the rule of the secretary, which has several tasks. When the student arrives, he goes to the teacher's desk and pass list. Once it's finishes, the secretary explains what we did the last class in case someone missed the other day. Also, the secretary has to write in the virtual campus a schedule about everything done in the class.

In this class the teacher showed us a video about non-verbal communication  and after that, we reunited in a circle and discuss if we agreed or not. I didn't agree in some parts of the video, like the part that says :"You have to fake a smile and you'll be better". What's the point? That won't fix the problems you've got...
Anyway, after that, we made an activity where we choose the pictures: One of ourself, a nother one from a classmate(both pictures from the virtual campus) and another picture choosed by our own.

This activity took me 20 minutes to do it.

First post

Welcome to the second part of this blog. Now, instead on Calculus, this blog is going to be aimed for the Communication Skills class. I'll be posting several things we do in class, as well as another content. Enjoy.

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