My opinion about "Communication Skills"

So here is the last post involving the "Communication Skill" subject. So I'm going to give my opinion about this.

Basically, a very lost potential. It started okay with a lot of activities to do with huge variety and learning something that people from a science career never learn too well. I was excited about how this subject was going to be, but before the first month passed, my intereset was completely lost.

In the first classes, we had debates and parcipitaded in several videos we see in class and I really liked it, but that was left to do the same thing over and over, so overall, it went really boring. The formula of the subject was: The secretary reviews his blog/activities/wikia, approve last's minute and then go to his chair. Over and over again.

Also, that's my least favourite thing about this: The secretary. I just don't get it. Why a classmate must stand infront of everyone telling stuff that the teacher is not only more capable to handle? The teacher must be the one bringing the blog, wikia and activity and review it, otherwise nobody will every pay attention. This ends with a complete mess with the classmates not knowing everything we have to do and then most of the activities are wrong. Every single student need feedback on their individual activities, not some general tips that you may already have right, because that's what professors are for, correcting all your work on their subjects.

The blog and the wikia are actually a unique way of developing extra work without tending to be linear with the activities. Maybe the one I liked more was the blog instead of the wikia, just that's because I already had to do posts in the Calculus subject.

As for the activities, they are all acceptable and you learn a lot from them. But again, the same problem as before, if you have no personal feedback, you won't be learning anything. Okay, yes, there are a lot of students and a lot of activities and the teacher is not only teaching this specific subject. Not only students have to study other subjects and also so other activities and projects but also, the whole activities have, in general, some procedures of making them, so it's easy to find little mistakes, and those little mistakes are, for example, the lenght of the introduction or the conclusion, how to redact a document as if you were the teacher, etc.

What I'm trying to say is that this is not the way to handle such a subject. In my opinion, it needs more participation but not with the secretary mechanic, like more debates or conferences, because with that, the subject can be way more entertained.

Nintendo, creator of the best non-verbal communication

Nintendo is a videogame distributor company, famous around the world by creating a huge cast of iconic characters, such as Mario, Link, Samus, Megaman, Kirby, Pokemon, etc.

One of the most interesting things about Nintendo games is that there is barely voice acting in the franchises. The characters usually scream when they attack, jump or take damage, but never saying any kind of word. As simple as it seems, the main characters are very popular. But why?

The answer is very simple: By using gestures and faces, ending with a personality that doesn't need to be spoken. Nintendo took the non-verbal communication into a whole new level by not only speaking with no words, but also to give development and a personality. 

Also, they make their franchises by giving changes to the same concepts (different graphics and mechanics), meaning that the characters evolve as years pass by, facing new challenges and enemies, growing as people along with the players.

Another example of good personality developed in the characters is the cross-over fighting game from Nintendo, Super Smash Bros Brawl, where the story resembles perfectly with the cast of characters, as well as they interact with each other.

Here is the opening scene of the game.

Microcredit

Microcredit is the extension of very small loans to impoverished borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment and a verifiable credit history. It is designed not only to support entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty, but also in many cases to empower women and uplift entire communities by extension. Microcredit is part of microfinance, which provides a wider range of financial services, especially savings accounts. Critics argue, however, that microcredit has not had a positive impact on gender relationships, does not alleviate poverty, has led many borrowers into a debt trap and constitutes a "privatization of welfare". But despite this criticism, the microcredit has made a huge impact on several countries in Asia and Africa.

Ideas relating to microcredit can be found at various times in modern history. Jonathan Swift inspired the Irish Loan Funds of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the mid-19th century, Individualist anarchist Lysander Spooner wrote about the benefits of numerous small loans for entrepreneurial activities to the poor as a way to alleviate poverty. At about the same time, but independently to Spooner, Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen founded the first cooperative lending banks to support farmers in rural Germany. In the 1950s, Akhtar Hameed Khan began distributing group-oriented credit in East Pakistan. Khan used the Comilla Model, in which credit is distributed through community-based initiatives. The project failed due to the over-involvement of the Pakistani government, and the hierarchies created within communities as certain members began to exert more control over loans than others.

Microcredit is ideally based on a unique set of principles that are readily distinguished from trends in the wider credit market. Microcredit organizations were initially created as alternatives to the "loan-sharks" known to take advantage of clients. Indeed; many microlenders began as non-profit organizations and operated with government funds or private subsidies. By the 1980s, however the "financial systems approach," influenced by neoliberalism and propagated by the Harvard Institute for International Development, became the dominant ideology among microcredit organizations. The commercialization of microcredit officially began in 1984 with the formation of Unit Desa (BRI-UD) within the Bank Rakyat Indonesia. Unit Desa offered ‘kupedes’ microloans based on market interest rates.

Ironically, many microcredit organizations now function as independent banks. This has led to their charging higher interest rates on loans and placing more emphasis on savings programs. Notably, Unit Desa has charged in excess of 20 per cent on small business loans. The application of neoliberal economics to microcredit has generated much debate among scholars and development practitioners, with some claiming that microcredit bank directors, such as Muhammad Yunus, apply the practices of loan sharks for their personal enrichment. Indeed, the academic debate foreshadowed a Wall-street style scandal involving the Mexican microcredit organization Compartamos.

Interview

I'm going to do an interview to Julio Franco, an editor from www.telefoneate.com .

Can you give us a short introduction about your studies and how you started here?

I studied a Bachelor's Arts degree in Journalism back in 2009 at the Faculty of Media Studies at Complutense University of Madrid and in fact I'm currently attending its last year.

And I started working at Telefoneate.com one day I was searching for a job in the Internet. They hired me in September of the last year and I’m currently working there as a freelance editor.

How many posts do you write per week?

As a freelance editor I can write a post anytime I want. I may write three post one after another or I may write one a month. However, I started writing a post a day from Monday to Friday, which makes five posts a week and more or less twenty or twenty five a month, and that was from September to February. Right now I’m looking for a better job, so I have little time to write. Because of that I hardly post anything nowadays, though I’m still working on it.

Can you tell us your writting techniques and the style you use?

I hardly can speak about writing techniques aside from the standard journalist style. Being myself the only person who actually studied Journalism in the site, I’m the best writer they have and my posts are the only ones made in a professional way, and that’s with the standard issue: corroborating sources for a truthful information, using an inverted pyramidal structure that goes from the most important or specific things to talk about to the least or more general ones, a subject-predicate-complement structure to make simple sentences, condensing all the important information in the least number of characters, etc… Also, the good use of hyperlinks and SEO tools among others is crucial to make the post visible not only on the website but for the internet browsers too.

Finally, does this job help you as a job experience?

Being honest with you, yes, it is. Working for this site lets me to practice everything I know about how to make news and stuff so I don’t get rusty. However, I feel like this is not a place I should be because it’s neither a real job nor a webpage that pays me well for a professional service like mine. It’s indeed a good curriculum filler but what I need is to work in a real press agency or a bigger site, that’s why, like I told you before, I hardly post nowadays, because I’m looking for a better place to work. However, if someone wants to start with something related to the world of new technologies or with something easy related to making news I’d suggest to begin in a place like this at least to practice and acquiring some experience while searching for a better place to be working on.