Comm 305 Reflection and the Value of the ePortfolio

The most challenging part of this professional communications course was learning the theories, as I am a nursing major not a comm major. Therefore, while I am very familiar with reading nursing literature, digging into communication literature was cumbersome. This hard part of the course was brightened by the understanding of communication processes, which was the direct product of struggling with the course material.

Completing the communication portion of my ePortfolio allowed me to have a professional presence online that I did not have prior to this semester. This course work has allowed me to begin to understand the complexities and importance of clear and honest communication to decrease stress and increase social and work balance. I am able to present evidence of communication theory online through the Comm blog and coursework pages.

This semester coincided with my final nursing course. That course required me to curate my nursing coursework within the ePortfolio. I would suggest to others to start this process early in their studies (for example, freshman year), and continue to edit and update work as it is returned, and then add it directly to the ePortfolio at regular intervals throughout the undergraduate studies. The process of retrieving and “reliving” work in order to determine editing needs or if it is a suitable candidate to add to a professional portfolio in the last semester of one’s senior year is… not enjoyable, to say the least.

My favorite assignment for this course was, please do not laugh, the annotated bibliography. While some may find this process tedious, my first experience with research was to organize information on three by five index cards. That was tedious. Writing an analysis of articles with appropriate application as part of the research process is a much more efficient way of gathering appropriate information. This work served as the beginning of the research report content.

While work is rarely characterized as fun, this image depicts the ideal environment in which to work and create and produce. Communication theories offer many insights into the struggles of maintaining this ideal, but they also offer evidence-based strategies to begin to come close to this ideal.

I cannot say my view of work-life communication has changed. Rather I now have communication theories to back up the frustrations I have been having with work. Additionally, I now can put in words, rather communication theories, the phenomena I have experienced in my 22+ working years and the norming I experienced in my social upbringing. Denker and Dougherty put into words three key concepts I have struggled with on a personal level: “clearly better than others” talk- that rationalizes behavior by comparing to the end product of other similar couples or groups; “reforming positivity”- which I always saw as “seeing the bright side of things” but is often an avoidance-type behavior, denying verbalization of experienced feelings; and finally “minimizing conflict”- which denies the impact of relational differences. I despise conflict, but I have learned over the years, that being an honest contributor to any relationship involves directly addressing differences. It is also interesting and relieving to know that my inability to “handle” work-related stress may be directly related to organizational communication and organizational culture, rather than my self-diagnosed general inability to “deal” with stress.