1.3 How We Communicate

Today, we played a game in which there are two partners faced in opposite directions, one partner had a picture and had to describe it to the other partner that then had to draw the picture using only the description that the first partner was giving.

The amount of noise in the room due to everyone talking at the same time made communicating with our partners difficult, it made for instructions to become lost in the mix, and made copying the image difficult. Describing the how the image was laid out was also difficult because of difference in levels of vocabulary which meant that understanding the message being given was difficult as we weren't on the same page and lost track of what we did/where we were.

Next time, I would use words describing the size and dimensions of the image so that my partner would know how the shapes in the image interact with each other, and would know how the layout of the page would look with more accuracy, and it would have made my descriptions more visual.

The Sender was partner 1 (me), the person describing the picture.

The Receiver was partner 2 (Amy), the person drawing the picture.

The Message was the image in this activity.

The Channel was voice/verbal/talking.

The message was Encoded by me describing the image to my partner, it would decoded in my instructions on how to draw the shape.

The message was Decoded by my partner hearing and interpreting and applying the information/directions I gave her.

The amount of noise in the room caused the greatest interference for my group, the level of noise in the room made it difficult to communicate and difficult to keep our own train of thought and not get distracted by the other conversations and instructions that we were hearing coming from the other groups in the class.

Semantic interference is when a message is not properly decoded/understood. In our group, the vocabulary being used was not always properly understood, for example, the word "equilateral triangle" wasn't properly understood and made for a confusing exchange because my partner was confused on what that meant and what she was supposed to do to draw the picture.