Discussion #3 Further Discussion

The one topic in this course that I wish had more information and could use further discussion would be emotions and reasoning. The book covered on this topic, but there was not much information. I wanted to know more about the process of emotional manipulation and how it affects the decisions we make. I know our emotions can cause us to become bias about certain things, and that can negatively influence us in the choices we make. Human emotions are strong and can change the way we think and see things, but I never thought they were that influential. I also wish the book went over ways we could possibly overcome this type of obstacle. It would have been helpful, because we deal with this in our daily life. Having a bit of direction to help us with this will allow us to become better critical thinkers and be more efficient in reasoning. 

Discussion #2 Favorite/Least Favorite & Improvements

My favorite part of this class was how informative and easy the textbook was to read and understand. It helped me understand the concepts even more, and the examples were relevant and again, easy to understand. If all textbooks were written this way, maybe I would be reading them more often. I also liked the fact that what I have learned in this class can be used in my daily life, especially being able to better communicate with others. My least favorite part of this class was the group project papers. It was annoying having to meet up with our group members because 90% of the time, we are all busy. So it was difficult to pick a time where we were all available. I took this online class because I thought it would make my schedule less stressful and more manageable, but it only added more stress because I was constantly worrying about the group projects. This could be one thing to improve. Another thing that can be improved is the 12-hour wait in between blog posts. I didn’t like that we had to wait after we posted one blog because some times I would forget to post the next blog after 12 hours. It would help a lot if we could post the blog posts whenever we wanted. It would have made things a lot easier. 

Discussion #1 What I've Learned

Over the course of this semester, I have learned a lot. Most importantly, this course stressed the importance of critical thinking and how it helps us in arguments and decision-making. We also learned what fallacies were and how to identify them in conversations and arguments. Inductive and deductive reasoning was a big part of this course too. We spent a lot of time differentiating them and using it in our reasoning. Another thing we learned were the different parts of an argument, such as the premises and the conclusion. Functions of language played an important part in arguments because using a certain language brings about a different end result. Lastly, this course has taught me how to make a strong argument and to communicate better with others. I believe the things we have learned this semester will help us in our future classes and make us better communicators to our peers.