Personal Journal for the Course COMM360

by Richmond Austria
The course provided learners with enough opportunity to explore
the information and communications media technology. It is particularly
important to highlight that the topics in the Modules can be considered
as sufficient enough to cover the course objectives. As such, the
modules present a good content for the course. The weekly discussion
forum allowed learners to be responsible in completing the course based
on a timely submission of the requirements. I find that effective since it
ensures that learners could become responsible in time management.
It is noteworthy to consider however that I find the requirement of
the course on book review as difficult due to the nature of the book used.
A book review and critique is a good activity especially for doctoral
students. Unfortunately, it is the content of the book that requires quick
review of its suitability for DCOMM students as it is more for engineering
students rather than for students taking a professional doctorate in
information and communication studies. In particular, the book requires
an engineering background before a reader could appreciate its value
and for that the course (COMM360) failed to meet this aspect of
appropriateness due to unsuitably selected book for such a class
requirement. As such, most learners in the DCOMM program are not
engineers and could not readily appreciate the book to add value to their
professional practice of communication studies and more specifically
towards advancing information and communication media technology
knowledge.
The content of the book is the one specific aspect that made it
difficult to understand since it directed primarily for engineering or
telecommunication experts. The topic on 5G technology has been
covered in Module 5 of the course where such subject was discussed
and need not be expanded in the form of a book review/critique. For a
book review activity, we could have selected a better book that can be
used by COMM360 students for the course. For instance, we could have
selected other books such as:
Gillespie, T. (2014). Media Technologies: Essays on Communication,
Materiality, and Society (Inside Technology), The MIT Press. A quick
review can be found: https://www.amazon.com/Media-Technologies-
Communication-Materiality-Technology/dp/0262525372

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or that of Pasquale, F. (2015). The Black Box Society. Harvard
University Press.
These are few of several other books that could have been
selected to be a part of the course requirements as this can be more
meaningful to the advancement of the knowledge of learners in
communication media technologies.
I personally feel responsible as well in the failure of the course to
select a better book content to cover the requirements of the course
objectives. It is only in April 2020 that I explored the book and would
therefore not given enough time to suggest to the entire class a revision
of the book to be reviewed. As such, the class could have selected a
better book worth their time to advance their knowledge about
communication media technologies. As co-creators of course contents,
we could have suggested a better book such as the ones
aforementioned.

Austria, Richmond COMM 360: PERSONAL JOURNAL 24 April 2020 Page 2 of 2