About Communication

1. What do you expect to learn from this pod-casting project? (List as much as possible.)
2. What does "communication" mean to you?

With this podcast project, I hope to both learn new material and learn how to present that material effectively.  This involves, firstly, receiving a bulk of information, and secondly, transmitting a selection of that information in an engaging and understandable way.  Communication thus comes in two stages for this project: reception and retransmission.  Attention must be paid at each stage lest we misconstrue the information we are receiving or misrepresent it while conveying it.  Nevertheless, the biggest part of the job lies in between these two stages, when we must decide which pieces of received information we should include in our podcast.  If we include too much material we will overwhelm the viewer and harm the presentation, but if we include too little material the results will be boring.  We should find a way to include a substantial range of information that remains easy to follow and understand.  In addition, because we are only first-year Japanese students, we have to take care not to include too much new vocabulary.  If we make that mistake, our fellow students will not be able to understand our podcast.  All new vocabulary words should appear on the screen accompanied by their English equivalent as they are being spoken.  At the same time, because we also hope to target a Japanese audience, we must maximize our use of the limited vocabulary that we already possess.  If we are able to fluently use what Japanese knowledge we have learned so far, it will make the best presentation possible to Japanese viewers.  This means that we should not try to tackle subjects too complex for our level of Japanese grammar and vocabulary.

More generally, I think communication always involves listening and speaking, receiving and conveying.  As it happens, this matches the subject of our podcast quite closely: we hope to examine how Japanese media and culture has influenced American media and culture, as well as vice-versa.