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Final Blog Post

Welcome back to my third and final blog post of the semester. Unfortunately, this will also be my last blog post for Professor Levy’s course. In the following text, we will be discussing all that we have learned throughout these past four months.

As this was my third course with Professor Levy, I came into the class knowing how things were done. Instead of pulling out a notebook and pens, I opened my laptop and signed into my Social Media accounts. Throughout the course, Facebook was the main source of communication between the professor and ourselves. Instead of using Brightspace to share his information with us, he uploaded all relevant documents and information onto our Facebook group “UOAC2″. Twitter on the other hand was used to take notes. During the lectures, we were asked to tweet 6 times about what the professor was discussing and include the class hashtag. In doing so, we were allowing ourselves to share our notes with our fellow classmates and anyone interested in the content of the course. Personally, I believe that this method of teaching is by far much better than the usual method because it pushes the students to want to engage in discussions and to listen in class.

As the classes progressed, my knowledge grew bigger and bigger. Professor Levy’s CMN3509 course, Théories avancées en communication, taught me many new aspects and concepts on the broad topic of communication. We came across many different aspects and philosophers, both old and new.

Signs and symbols

One of the first things that we learned were signs and symbols. To begin, we discussed that signs are organised in systems. There are three different kinds of signs. The first, clues (indices) is a physical connection between the sign and the referent. The second, icons, are an analogy or similarity of form between the sign and the referent. And thirdly, symbols, those occur when the sign is cut in two, signifying and signified, the relation between signifier and signified is conventional. Of course, let us not forget about this iconic picture.

Pragmatic

Before this course, I had no idea what the term pragmatic meant or what it was used for. I now know that it comes from the Greek word “Pragma” which means action. I’ve also learned that in the pragmatic dimension of speech, we learn that speech can not only be descriptive, but it also plays other social roles such as orders, prayers, and promises.

Language-games

Throughout Professor Levy’s course, we were asked to do weekly readings and tweet about the interesting facts that we came across. As most of these readings were based on philosophers and writers, my knowledge on various topics grew drastically. Ludwig Wittgenstein, a mathematician and philosopher, introduced the concept of language-games. He used this term to appoint forms of language simpler than the entirety of language itself. As we progress into the reading, we learn that the term “language-game” is used to refer to various different things such as simple uses of language with which children are first taught language (training) and specific regions of language with their own grammars and relations to other language-games.

Overall, Professor Levy’s CMN3509 course has taught me many new things. I went into the class four months ago with a smaller knowledge and understanding of communication. We used Facebook, Twitter and Blogs to develop collaborative learning. I now submit my final project for the class knowing that communication is not just a conversation between two people. On top of the previously mentioned concepts learned, I leave the class knowing that every action has a symbolic dimension, that epistemology is the science of communication and that rhetoric is a mix of actions and communications.

We now find ourselves at the end. I would like thank Professor Levy for not only teaching me three of my most memorable courses (the good kind of memorable of course) but for also taking in consideration the fact that the world is evolving, social media is growing and students have more than just one class to study for. Instead of feeling forced to go to class and get confused when it was time to write blogs, we would look forward to Wednesdays and have no problem submitting our blogs. That being said, it is now time to say goodbye. You will definitely be missed!

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Blog 2

Welcome back to the exciting updates on Professor Levy’s CMN3509 course, Théories avancées en communication. We have learned so many new exciting things since the last blog post!

In this second part of the course, we come across many new concepts such as pragmatism, rhetoric and the symbolic dimensions and some interesting authors like Austin, Karl Popper and even Plato. 

To begin, we analysed the work of famous philosopher, John Langshaw Austin. He focuses on linguistic phenomenology which is an analysis of the concepts and ways of expression of every day language and on speech act theory which is the idea that every use of language carries a performative dimension. 

Also, we learn in class that there are three types of reasoning. The first is abduction, it is based on the formulation of an explanatory hypothesis. The second, induction, is there to help us verify/invalidate hypotheses. And the third one, deduction, the fact to arrive at a reality from other information.

Another very interesting concept that we learned throughout the course is rhetoric and its persuasive strategy. In all, it is composed by three dimensions: logos, ethos and pathos. Logos is the Greek term for “logic”. Ethnos is established through a variety of factors including status. Pathos appeals a person to feel excited, sad, angry, jealous, etc. This is very interesting because it broadens many peoples knowledge on communication and language itself.

What is a blog without a fun fact? Did you know, messages must come out of the heart (so cute)

Alright, that’s it for this blog, stay tuned for the final Blog… 😊

See you soon

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Blog 1

Since my very first day of university two years ago (CMN1560), I have been very fond of Professor Levy’s teaching method. It is not every day that you see university classes being taught via Facebook and Twitter. Not only does his teaching method make students want to show up to class and participate but it reflects on the material being taught.

Throughout the first few weeks, we discussed many different concepts such as symbols, signs, the construction of grammar and read several texts about different people and their opinions. Not only did we learn about language itself and its subparts, but we also spent a great amount of time learning and understanding the phenomenon of context and its three faces. The first is the intra-textual context, it is based on a set of relations between unities within the same text. The second, the inter-textual concept, is the set of relations of a text with other texts of the same author, genre, etc… And the last concept is the extra-textual one, it is a shared situation/common memory of a group of people. Another interesting fact that I learned in this class while reading one of the texts is that there IS such thing as over-categorizing something.

As we can see, Professor Levy’s course not only teaches us very interesting and important material, but it also allows us to broaden our knowledge while using the tools that play a huge role in today’s world.

Stay tuned to see what the next two months will teach us!!

In honour of Halloween :)