Project Proposal: Culture Intergration

Lamees Al Balushi

Zachary Hastreiter

Christian Straussner

Xinyue Wang

COMM 250

23 Feb. 2015

Project Proposal: Culture Intergration

 In recent years, America has been attracting more students from all over the world to attend America’s top Universities to pursue academic degrees. Foreign students attending U.S Universities have created micro multicultural societies in which students from different cultures meet. The students that attend Universities in America often seek each other out due to similar attributes. These students work to communicate with each other but there are some difficulties that often become apparent. Midwestern states like Nebraska, as compared with states on the west and east coast, often have a lower number of international students. At the University of Nebraska the foreign student population is a smaller percentile compared to the overall academic population of the University environment. Therefore, the difficulties that international students face in adapting to the environment of the United States and the University, in particular, is more difficult than what the native students are facing on a daily basis. It is apparent that there is a need to assist international with their transition to a US Universities as well as students programs for students.  There is a need to for improvement.  

In noting our experiences and the experiences of others, we learned that there are many organized activities that can improve interaction between international students and native students, and that they can be helpful, but it’s not enough. Multicultural communication in the world has become more diverse. It’s particularly important for college students in multi-cultural environments to improve their communication between each other. We decided to focus our project on improving the communication based difficulties, and making the communication between international students and the native students more efficient by using various social media outlets.

To understand the difficulties that the international and native students face in communicating and their attitudes to each other, we constructed a survey to interview students. The survey was created and will be conducted by Lamees and Xinyue, and interviews created and to be conducted by Zach and Christian. The survey will contain two sets of questions. The first set of questions target is to learn the difficulties that the two groups of students have with communication and interacting or contacting different cultures. The second part of the survey is about how students use the various social media outlets, and learning the attitudes of students toward different cultures. We would use our findings to draw conclusions on how to improve these communication challenges. Lamees and Xinyue will use Facebook as one aspect to provide a survey to their friends and fellow students.  An interview with students will be conducted and elaborate on some fundamental concept questions relating to international students at UNL and how communication is a large factor in their terms of a settlement. The interview questions will ask students about their culture and how they have adapted to the UNL academic and social groups or environment.  

In conducting the survey and interviews, we hope to raise awareness to the UNL community by providing our informational platforms to the International Student and Scholar Office in hope that it will provide awareness of these issues affecting foreign students that apply and attend UNL. After gathering the insights from the survey and interviews, we will conduct several activities which will connect students by using various social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, HiNative, and Youtube.  

To conduct the survey and interviews, we will have to take into account that language can be a factor as well as a cultures social conduct. These factors could be two significant barriers to prevent the two groups of students to communicate with each other effectively.  To combat these factors or barriers, we will use social media outlets, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to conduct survey and interview type activities and to collect information about the various students’ cultures; we will use Youtube or Instagram, to record videos of international students allowing these students to introduce their cultures to UNL. Another target is to introduce HiNative; an app, in which people can learn the language they are interested in using.  For example, if you don’t know how to express a term or question in English, the user would post a question to HiNative and then the native speaker would answer the question for you. HiNative would allow native students to provide assistance to international students, helping them improve their English and adapting to UNL. An excerpt of questions will include asking the following: Where the student is from? What was their decision process in choosing UNL? What clubs/organizations is he/she apart of on campus? How do they get connected or interested in those groups? Is it difficult to get involved on campus?  Is there a communication barrier? Have you asked other international students to become involved in the groups you have joined on campus?

Upon completion of the surveys and interviews, we begin activities that will utilize the social media outlets. Facebook, Twitter and Instragram will be used to address some of the questions students have regarding other’s languages and cultures. These outlets will provide a forum for students to answer and check their knowledge about different cultures. To encourage participation, students will be rewarded for participating in the set activities. The social media activities will provide an outlet for assistance to the international students to improve their language skills and communication and in turn the native students will learn about other cultures effectively.        

Interviews (Zach and Christian) and survey (Lamees and Xinyue) will be completed by March 6th. Once we have combined all the information from the two sources, we will have some insight on how to create activities that will assist with the difficulties of communication between multi-cultural groups. The activities planned will be set up by Lamees and Xinyue, and will be based from the information compiled from the survey, interviews and social initial social media activity. After the planned activities are completed, Zach and Christian will analyze the activities results.  Analyzing the activities results will create insight into how the communication process is working between students groups. A final report will be completed to provide a summary of our projects findings and contain proposed suggestions to provide to UNL International Student and Scholar Office for future assistance with international students attending UNL. 

COMM 250

Commons Campaign

Nick Gilbert, Brandon Knoop, Meghan McGuigan-Sporkin

UNLConnect: A Proposal

            As students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, we have noticed that many of our classmates do not talk to one another before class and many people sit alone in the dining halls. In our project, tentatively titled UNLConnect, we would like to use a variety of methods to encourage interaction between students in an effort to improve the sense of community here on campus. In this project proposal, we will analyze the rhetorical situation, explain our project in terms of the rhetorical canons, and finally set up a timeline and group member roles.

The rhetorical exigence for our project is that we feel there is a lessened sense of community in UNL as we have noticed in each of our classes most people choose not interact with each other before class and instead are on their phones all the time. Additionally there are a lot of people who sit alone in the dining halls while eating, and we have noticed that there are no efforts made for others to sit with them and include them. Our rhetorical audience is the student community of UNL because our goal is for UNL to have a more united student population on campus. Some of the constraints we considered for our project is that some people will be too stuck in their ways to even attempt interacting with their peers and other people will be to shy to consider talking to a complete stranger. The opportunities for our project to succeed is that a lot of people on our campus are open-minded and social and would be up for the challenge of interacting with their peers especially if one of the outcomes is that they would make new friends. Our goal for this project is to make UNL a more unified campus and get the student body as a whole to engage with one another more rather than relying on strictly their phones and social media for their socialization.

            In terms of invention, our project requires us to find the appropriate argument to convince our audience of college students to improve the community through being more social before class and in the dining halls. We decided that the best combination of pathos, ethos, and logos for our situation entailed briefly describing how our project benefits our audience (logos and pathos) and telling them honestly why we are doing it (ethos). In terms of arrangement, when we speak to our classmates we will first describe what we are doing (and want them to do), then how it benefits them, and finally why we are doing. In terms of memory, we will have to know the details of our project, but more information will be available on our UNLConnect Facebook, Twitter, and website. Delivery and style will be integral to our success because if we are to be successful we need people to remember our project and then participate. Therefore we will want exhibit the traits associated with good speakers including clear, loud, and dynamic voice and maintaining eye contact. The online parts of our project will all reflect the rhetorical canons in the appropriate way for the medium.

            Our timeline and group roles are as follows:

·       March 2: Create UNLConnect Twitter, Facebook, and Website page

·       March 9: through April 5 Campaign: We will tell classes, clubs, halls/floors, and friends about our project and actively participate on our social media pages

·       April 13: Poll classmates on success of our campaign and prepare portofolio

·       April 20: Prepare presentation

·       April 27-May 3: Present our project to the class

·       Brandon: administer Facebook page, polling, campaign

·       Nick: administer Twitter account, prepare presentation, campaign

·       Meghan: administer website, prepare portfolio, campaign

Commons Campaign Proposal: Good Dog Rescue

Rhetorical Media and Civic Life

Paige Osborne, Kalyn Calhoun, Alex Flint

Campaign Proposal

February 24, 2015

Campaign Proposal

Good Dog Rescue in Palmyra, Nebraska is a no-kill animal shelter who partners with the No Kill Advocacy Club on city campus. A non-profit organization, Good Dog Rescue has placed over 55 dogs in happy homes. We hope to make that number grow. Our goal is to raise awareness of the foundation along with upgrading the adoption pictures and ultimately, get five dogs adopted through our commons campaign. The organization has a network of foster homes, but these are not their forever homes, which brings us to our exigence.

Our goal is to get the University of Nebraska-Lincoln community directly involved in creating a solution for these lovable pups. The rhetorical audience that we are aiming to target includes students, faculty and members of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln community. A “fitting” response is dictated by the situation. The better the speaker understands an audience’s background, expectations, and experiences, the better they will be able to determine a “fitting” response in analyzing whether the audience agrees or disagrees. We have chosen to work with city campus because students are at an age where they begin taking on more responsibilities and one may include owning a pet. It is also the perfect age for students to begin volunteer work, which may be added to a resume.

There are many great opportunities that can come from this campaign. Since the organization is volunteer-run, there is a small fee when purchasing a dog but this fee does not pay for the dog itself, it goes toward the cost of maintaining facilities and providing food/shelter to the animals. Not only will these dogs be going to good homes, but also the money they make will help the organization continue to operate. For these dogs, there is no other alternative.

Homeless animals outnumber homeless people five to one, this statistic is very saddening. Only one out of every ten dogs will find a permanent home in his or her lifetime. The ASPCA website states that approximately 2.7 million animals are euthanized annually and of all dogs entering shelters about 35% are adopted. Which brings us to some of our constraints. There is potential that we will not get the dogs adopted and that the organization will be unwilling to adapt to our new set of communication strategies. If the organization does not agree with our social media campaigns we will raise our goal of getting five dogs adopted to eight and focus on our finale of bringing the dogs to campus and make sure students are viewing our advertisements.

It is very apparent that the growth of this organization will plummet if outside parties do not take action. Which is why we have already taken the first step in our campaign by directly talking to the owners of Good Dog Rescue. The next step is to visit Good Dog Rescue, which we plan to do next week. After having a one-on-one meeting with them, we will have a better understanding of what the organization directly needs. We plan on creating advertisements to advocate Good Dog Rescue and its social media, which will be placed around campus in areas of high traffic to gain attention to our campaign and the media pages. Next, we will get the dogs cleaned up and ready for a “photography booth” style photo shoot. These pictures will be added to an Instagram page we will be rebuilding for them. We are going to be creating a twitter page using a specific hash tag; GoodDogNE and our grand finale will be bringing the dogs to campus. We will be filming and documenting each and every activity that we do to create a short film using iMovie that will be shown to the class at the end of the semester.

    The whole group will be accountable for most of the responsibilities of this project. Kalyn will be responsible for bringing attention to their Facebook page via likes and shares with her Facebook friends. Collectively, we’ll work on the photo-shoot and bumping the organization’s Instagram account from its current state of zero followers, six posts, last updated 82 weeks ago to creating a whole new account, GoodDogNe. Paige will be responsible for creating the advertisement to disperse on campus. Alex will be handling our Twitter campaign, and creating tweets to bring more awareness, and linking them with our Instagram account. Finally, we’ll bring the dogs to campus. We’ll set up a booth by the student union and encourage students to take a picture with their favorite pup and put it on Instagram using our hash tag; GoodDogNe. Getting the students to interact with the dogs will be one of the last steps in getting them adopted. Kalyn will be documenting each step in this process to collaborate a short film, which will be presented to the class at the end of the semester showing our work. We’ll continue to maintain our social media and get interested parties directly in touch with Good Dog Rescue.

            Meeting our goals for this project will contribute to a lasting impact on Good Dog Rescue. Our goal is to build on their success as well as spread awareness of this local non-profit organization. If the Lincoln city Animal Shelter gets can 10,000 likes on their Facebook page, why cant Good Dog Rescue?

Work Cited

Pet Statistics. (n.d.). Retrieved February 24, 2015, from https://www.aspca.org/about-us/faq/pet-statistics

Commons Campaign Proposal: Drunk Driving on Campus

Commons Campaigns Proposal: Drunk Driving On Campus

Mikayla Pate

Preston Phillips

Alex Feekin

Nicole Ochal

The problem (exigence) that we have found is present both within the city of Lincoln, as well as on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. The presence of drunk driving is a problem that needs to be addressed.  We have found this to be a huge problem because it puts so many people in danger, especially when there are safer alternatives available to students.  We plan on addressing the student population at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We may face a population of students who are unwilling to participate in any surveys regarding this topic, but we do have a huge opportunity to gain responses from classmates. By creating an online survey we will allow students to keep a sense of anonymity, since in-person surveys may create a judgemental atmosphere. Our proposal has the opportunity to put an end to drunk driving by the students of University of Nebraska-Lincoln. By tailoring an advertising campaign to a target audience with a specific message that is relatable to them we can help put an end to this practice. For example, if we find that most respondents do drink and drive, we will focus on promoting the free cab rides. If we find that people know about the free cab rides then we can focus on fixing that problem.  Our overall goal is to stop students from drinking and driving.

Drunk driving is an awful practice that too many of our Nebraska residents participate in. This greatly affects our students, and we aim to stop and prevent this practice by UNL students. In 2003, the state of Nebraska had over 9,000 arrests that involved driving while intoxicated. There were over 31,000 vehicle crashes that involved an intoxicated driver. This resulted in over 200 deaths. This is exactly why we need to address the topic of drunk driving on our campus. We need to have an inventive/creative approach to this problem, we need to have a good structure, we need to draw from stylistic elements, make our project memorable, and figure out the best medium of delivery. Our proposal is unique and is bound to get us the results we are looking for. We have an organizational process that in terms will make it so the people that take the survey have full privacy, with a judgment free environment. Our goal is to be determined, but will help decrease the rate of students who drink and drive.  We plan to utilize things that students are actually interested in and things that will get their attention. Since we won’t have an actual plan/goal until our research is done, we are currently unable to give specifics. The way we will approach this goal is to conduct a survey that knows no discrimination, and will insure the results we want are the results we get. The style we will use will allow us to directly reach out to the student population. Our structure will be very tailored, as we have a set plan that contains a survey, compiling results, analyzing the situation and creating an advertising strategy. We want to make it seem as inviting as we possible can. The only way to make this campaign memorable, is if we carefully direct it to students on a personal level, and make them think about how their actions affect others. Our project will be memorable because we are focusing on an issue that greatly affects the student population; our project has the ability to make a real difference on this campus. We plan on utilizing the following types of media depending upon what the results of our survey show up. We may utilize outdoor media, social media, and fliers/posters. Our campaign will  be partially ran, through the use of posters and fliers in public spaces where approval does not have to be gained to post things. Although we will submit a proposal for a full advertising campaign that the university could utilize.

Our project will consist of Nicole putting together the questions that our group has come up with into an online survey and will work on getting as many students as possible to participate in it. Alex will compile the results from our surveys and find our target audience and our problems. Preston and Mikayla will put together the main part of the advertising campaign. We will all work as a group during each step, although some will be more involved in certain aspects of the project.  We plan on having our survey begin on March 1 and go until March 14. At that time we will begin compiling results. We expect to finish that by March 21 and will have our campaign outlined by March 28. We expect to finish our campaign by April 15.

Nebraska Department of Roads. (n.d.). Retrieved February 24, 2015, from http://www.transportation.nebraska.gov/nohs/areas/al1enf.html#stats

Coomons Campaign Proposal: #LookUp

Rhetoric, Media and Civic Live
Commons Campaign Proposal
Leland Chow, Evan Wooten
23 February 2015
We have decided on running both a Facebook and Twitter hashtag campaign called #LookUp. #LookUp is a campaign of asking people to spend less time on their technological devices while walking, and just look up, see and maybe communicate more with other people. This campaign is required because face-to-face human interaction nowadays has become less and less, and instead are more and more dependent on technological devices. Because of this, there is a need to encourage people to interact more with other people face-to-face and being less dependent on technology.

The audience is actually everyone and anyone in Lincoln, Nebraska, ranging from students, faculty, staffs, to even the public. We believe we should include everyone in Lincoln, Nebraska because it is a campaign for all. However, we do believe that are constraints facing response to this campaign. One of them might be that the people might not be paying attention to the #LookUp account and page in Twitter and Facebook respectively. Another constraint will be the lack of participation from the audience as the audience might think that it is too challenging for them to do. Besides, another constraint is that the people might be apathetic towards the challenges, as the people in the modern society are vulnerable to caring less. Yet another constraint is that the audience might feel that it is too awkward for them to participate in the challenge, as they might be too shy or it might be outside of their comfort zone.

However, there are opportunities facing response to the campaign as well. The people can pick and choose the challenges they think are feasible to do, as the challenges are not timed definitely. Moreover, people who participate in the campaign can have a chance of meeting new people and making friends with them, forging a new friendship. Another opportunity is that the people will also be more aware of surroundings, and pay more attention to the beauty of the nature.

This campaign is a fitting response to the issues we are facing now because we want more people to interact with one another, and through this campaign, we are challenging the people to not be on their technological devices all the time. We hope that this campaign does not only reach Lincoln, Nebraska, nor only Nebraska, but all around the world, but fundamentally, we just hope that people will not be on their phones all the time.

As we have noted, our medium for this project will be social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook. Not only will we be using just social media but there will be a few tangibles as well, for example we will be placing post-it notes around campus with our tagline and hashtag. These Post-it notes will be hidden in various areas giving the campaign an exclusive feeling; if you find them, you have become a part of a movement. This stems from the original idea of a flash mob, in traditional flashmobs a specific group of people would find hidden messages on the internet and get together to create something, this again is the feeling of exclusivity. Our project will be drawing from the ideas of traditional flash mobs with our own innovative twists. Having the hidden Post-it notes and exclusive vibe to our campaign will make people want to be a part of the movement. Once people have read the Post-it notes, they will be intrigued and search the hashtag of LookUp, they will then see the account and read what we are about and the different challenges we give out. Hopefully, people will be interested and participate. This will build a sense of community amongst the participants. Though it may be ironic that we are using social media to get people off of social media, it makes us memorable. In this case we are fighting fire with fire, it would be difficult otherwise. This feeling of community will bring people closer and they will be more willing to work together on these challenges. The idea that more people will be interacting and becoming a part of this community will make our campaign useful, fun, and memorable. Although people always talk about wanting to not be dependent on technology, no one has done anything about it… We are.

Action Timeline and Division of Work

Time (Week of)	Action	Person Involved
12 February 2015	Set up Facebook page and Twitter account for #LookUp.	Leland (Facebook), Evan (Twitter)
16 February 2015	Design logo and poster for #LookUp.	Leland (ask friend to help in logo), Evan (poster)
23 February 2015	Count the number of people using their technological devices Print up posters and paste them onto the noticeboards. Put up Post-It notes saying #LookUp on random places on random days at any time. Finalize the first few challenges. Write tweets and posts on Twitter and Facebook respectively.	Leland and Evan Evan (Twitter), Leland (Facebook)
2 March 2015	Start first challenge (Weekly or daily). Take screenshots of first challenge.	Leland (Facebook), Evan (Twitter)
9 March 2015 until the end of campaign.	Continue posting and tweeting challenges (Weekly or daily). Continue taking screenshots of challenges.	Leland (Facebook), Evan (Twitter)

Reading Guide for Week 7

Tuesday: Trust Me, I’m a Rhetorician

Jay Heinrichs, “Get Them to Like You,” “Make Them Listen,” “Show Leadership,” and “Win Their Trust,” p. 46-78.

1. What is ethos? How does it relate to character, credibility, ethics, and decorum? 

2. What are Aristotle's three essential characteristics of ethos?

3. What are some specific strategies to enhance your ethos?

Thursday: Toward an Ethos of the Extraordinary

Rebecca N. Goldstein, “In the Shadow of the Acropolis,” in Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014), p. 123-62.

*This is the most difficult reading we will be doing all semester. Power through it.

1. How does Goldstein's account of ethos differ from Heinrichs? Where do their different conceptions overlap?

2. How does arete and kleos connect to ethos?

3. What is the "ethos of the extraordinary"? What are examples of it in action?

4. How might we understand the "will to matter" in an age of Facebook and Twitter?