Preference

My favorite thing in this class was the blogging.  I liked being able to apply what I learned in class in my blogs and have the students comment on it allowing me to get feedback and get more information that I can apply later.  Blogging also has taught me how to effectively communicate online since I had never had a blog before.  This will help down the road with my profession because almost all companies are now big in social media and blogging and marketing online.  The least favorite thing bout this class was having to write the 2 papers.  Even though it taught me alot, writing papers have never been a strong suit of mine.  To be honest, I dont think there are many things that need to be changed with this class.

What I learned

Throughout this semester in Comm 41, I have learned many things that have been beneficial and will continue to be beneficial for a long time to come.  One of the most important things I learned was how to blog correctly and speak on the internet correctly.  Personally, I have never had a blog before or had the urge to blog before but after going through this class I have learned many techniques and proper use of blogging that will help with my life down the road.  Another topic that I learned alot from was fallacies.  I had never really worked with fallacies much before in depth and this class gave me the knowledge about what fallacies are and specific definitions that relate to them.  This new knowledge will help me out with my writing and reading in college and in life.  Another item that I learned was how to correctly disect an article and write an essay that breaks down the different techniques that the author uses.  Personally, this is one of the classes in college that I have been able to take alot from and will be able to put to great use.

Mission Critical

As stated in the about section of mission critical, the goal of mission critical is to create a virtual lab, capable of familiarizing users with the basic concepts of critical thinking in a self-paced, interactive environment.  The mission critical website describes different arguments, analysis of arguments, fallacies and non-rational persuasion, and other commonly used fallacies.  Many of these arguments and fallacies on the website have been explaned previously in this class.  One section that I learned alot from was conjunctions and disjunctions.  The simplest deductions are those involving two or more things connected by a conjunction or a disjunction.  Conjunction and disjunction are governed by multiple rules.  These are and, affirm all, negate one and or, affirm one, negate all.  These rules helped me understand the proper uses of conjunctions and disjunctions because they were never really gone over in class previously.  Also, the examples given in the two sections helped me understand them with a real example.

Cause and effect

As it is stated on the website, one of the most important uses for inductive reasoning is to argue casuation.  I thought the example that the website gives about the accident gives a good example of casuation and cause and effect and a real life example of how it is used.  By arguing that the bicyclist would have not caused the accident if the truck wasn't parked illegally in the bike line would prove that the effect wasn't his fault because the bicyclist would have kept going on as normal instead of having to swerve into the road to avoid the traffic.  I also found it useful when the website gave three reasons for the strength of a casual argument.  1) How acceptable or demonstrable the implied comparison is 2) How likely the case for causation seems to be. 3) How credible the "only significant difference" or "only significant commonality claim" is.  By using these three different statutes, you can determine the strength of the argument such as the ones given in the exercises.