Reflection Blog 1

In my syllabus review paper, I came up with four things that I would like to get out of this class:
-Learn the groundwork of ethics
-Improve myself professionally
-Exercise in empathy (learn other points of view via class discussion)
-Learn about Prezi-tations

Since these are my goals, and this is my reflection on weeks 1-4, I’ll focus on them.

As far as learning the groundwork of ethics, I feel I’ve learned a lot from the text. I’ve taken philosophy courses before but not ethics courses. It’s one thing to have a vague understanding of how moral decisions come to be, but it’s entirely another thing to understand the history of ethics and learn about the different systems we can use to measure ethical dilemmas. I have found that I much prefer reading the Tavani text versus the Ess text. I’m not an idiot, yet I find myself reading paragraphs several times in order to understand what he’s trying to say. I find Tavani’s style of writing much more straightforward and easy to comprehend. His analogies are spot on.

My second goal is to improve myself professionally. As of right now, I feel that we’ve spent a lot of time on “outside of work” situations and less “inside of work” situations. For example, illegal music sharing and Facebook have very little to do with my job in the IT industry. I’m not saying that the things we’re discussing have no professional implications, though. I’m lucky to work for a profitable and well-funded company, so the idea that we would not stay fully compliant from a licensing standpoint doesn’t even cross my mind. I imagine if I worked for a small startup with limited funds, the temptation (or even pressure from above) might be different. I hope we are able to cover some “work situations” in more detail in the coming weeks.

I feel that the class discussions have been very good so far. I don’t want to offend anyone by calling out a specific student, but I think that having Miyuki Schmidt in our class is a great thing. Her perspective, having grown up on the other side of the world, has I think added a lot to the discussion. Kudos to her for conveying her thoughts clearly and contributing a great deal to the discussion. Clearly we have a diverse group and I think that the posts thus far have been more than “posting the minimum.”

At this point we’ve done our Practice Prezi’s and I think I sort of have the hang of it. It’s a pretty neat tool, to be sure! I don’t know how much I’ll be able to apply it in the real world after this class (i.e. professionally) but I can imagine that Marketing folks find it to be a refreshing option after being “stuck” with PowerPoint for quite a while now. I’ve analogized that Prezi is to PowerPoint what PowerPoint was to the blackboard. Cool stuff.