Persuasive communication in vocational development.

Last week I worked at an exhibition called Skills Masters. During three days students compete to become the best cook, electrician, mechanic etc. Each stand represent a trade or business and so I had to work on the OBIT stand, what represent the installation trade. Several MBO and VMBO students fight to be the best heating installer, roof builder, bathroom installer etc of the Netherlands. During this competition the exhibition is visited by schools and their students. These students are between 12 and 15 years old and have to choose their study direction. The Skills Masters exhibition shows all possible studies and every exhibitor tries to inform and persuade the students to choose the presented studies.
Students visit the exhibition with their school and will separated in groups of 10 persons. Every group get a ‘tour guide’ and these guides ensure that the students will visit all stands. At each stand there are employees who will guide the students through the stand and tell them about the studies represented.  It sounds like a very good an useful method to inform the students about the study opportunities they have, but there seems to be a contradiction between reality and theory.

However, to communicate you need a sender and a receiver. Walking on the exhibition you can see that all senders did their work very well, but their success depends on the interaction between sender and receiver, so the receiver is really important to succeed. During my work on the exhibition it was clear to me that most of the receivers are not interested in the information and are not listening to the tour guides. A small amount of information the exhibitor want to communicate to the students will be received and so all the effort has less success.  All these companies and trade representatives tries to inform and persuade the children, they put a lot of effort in the exhibition but what will be the outcome of all this? In my opinion the outcome of the exhibition is minimal, simply because it seems the receiver is not interested in the information.

Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)

Computer mediated communication is communication by the computer. Some examples of this type of communication are MSN, E-mail but also Dating-Sites and social network sites. Since internet became normal in every household and so everybody has access to these technologies our communication has changed. The good-old Face to Face communication now has to compete against all these computer types of communication. However, are these new communication technologies a step forward or backwards? Researchers developed different theory’s, some researches think face to face communication is still the best form of communication. Other researchers think that the computer mediated communication is the best form of communication.

In my opinion both types has their advantages and off course disadvantages. Face to Face communication is mostly verbal and non-verbal. Computer mediated communication is mostly text based communication and then it is only verbal communication, but the latest technologies made it possible to communicate non-verbal too (skype/webcam/sending pictures). By Face to Face communication it is possible to share more information in a shorter time, however 
research shows that people share more intimacy in computer mediated communication than in Face to Face communication. Two conflicting theories about computed mediated communication is the rich-get-richer theory and the poor-get-richer theory. People who communicate easy in Face to Face situations are helped by CMC and so, the richer people get richer. Other researches think that people who communicate not very ease in Face to Face situations are helped to communicate by CMC. In my opinion both of the theories are true. The rich will get richer, but also the poor will get richer because they can communicate anonymous, and only when they want to communicate and to people they want to communicate with.

Overall, I think CMC is a very useful type of communication what can help a lot of people to communicate to their friends and to new people. I would say it is a rich type of communication because of all its advantages. However, be careful because in several occasions people can swap their identity.

Propaganda: A part of history?

While reading documents of the Second World War during the History lessons you could see the power of communication. Nowadays we know the stories from all the possible angles but back in that days the people knew just a small part of the story. And this small part was mostly based on propaganda. The Nazi’s even had a minister of Propaganda to  communicate successful stories to the German population but also to communicate to other nations. In these days Propaganda was a very important and useful tool to get the crowd shared behind you, because there was less communication and so nobody could control the facts and the stories you told them.

However, there had been some developments what makes Propaganda a less easy tool to use. All over the world are journalists, they film everything and the same day this information can be broadcasted on the other end of the world. Nowadays a lot of people are using social network sites, everybody has an camera on his phone so all information can be send throughout the world in just a few minutes. However not everybody seems to understand the difficulty of Propaganda.

A very well-known example of failed Propaganda was a minister of information in Iraq. I think most of the people remember Al Sahaf the minister of Information of Iraq. He was the man who told the whole world that no American has crossed the border yet, there weren’t any Americans in their country and at that moment you could hear bombs falling in the background.

Last week an example of bad propaganda was seen in North-Africa. Khadafy’s television station broadcasted some peaceful pictures while the BBC broadcasted the picture  of thousands people shouting against the regime, cars were on fire, and you saw the army firing on their own population.

Due to the technical developments what means that information can be send into the world by everybody and can be received by everybody means that Propaganda is a part of history?

Content difficulty or something else.....?

I have discovered a new difficulty in my study. Till now the content of the different colleges was sometimes hard to follow, difficult or uninteresting, but the speakers knew how to made the subject interesting and in the end we were able to understand the subject due to the explanations of the speaker.
But frow now on, everything has been changed. Not the content is difficult anymore, no, the content has been made difficult and uninteresting, not because it is a hard subject or uninteresting subject, no the speaker knows exactly how to NOT motivate us. By using all difficult words he knows (has he got something to proof?), by using very good non motivated communication skills  and finally by making the subject very abstract. But why would he do this? Does he want to show us that he is a reasonable smart person , is he afraid of losing his job so he don't want to let us understand something about his colleges. I don't get this, because in my opinion the definition of a smart person is a person who can clearify hard topics in an easy language/way. Why would he demotivate us, why would he make his college not to understand?......