Merry Christmas everyone!!!

Here's wishing you all a very blessed Christmas indeed! This is truly the most wonderful time of the year! Just always remember that Jesus is the reason for the season! While we're all having an enjoyable time with our families and friends during the holidays, let's all take the time to stop for a moment and think of those who are less fortunate, and particularly those who are experiencing hardship or loss. I especially hope each of you will say a prayer for the family and friends of Jean and Jim Smith, who are dealing with a very tragic loss this Christmas, and also for a dear friend of mine who is going through his first Christmas without his twin brother. My heart goes out to both of these families.

May each of you experience the peace and love of Christmas during this holiday season and always! God bless! :)

Final Presentation Day aka I'm officially finished with Fall Semester '08

Ahh, how nice it is to finally be able to refer to this semester in past tense! Before I completely transition to Christmas break mode and get pumped up for our final playoff game against Montana tomorrow night (don't forget to Purple Out!!!), I wanted to post one final, graded blog entry about a particular presentation that interested me. One of my co-presenters on the environmental topic panel discussed Pickens Plan. While researching political advertising during the 2008 campaign as part of a project for my Media & Politics class, I saw several of the Pickens ads, but knew very little about the actual plan. The presentation today provided a detailed overview of the plan, and peaked my interest to do further research about it. From what I understand, the Pickens Plan is based on the idea that

the United States is the Saudi Arabia of wind power.

It advocates utilizing wind energy in order to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I have not had time to examine this in depth, but for those who are also interested, you can read the plan here. One question was brought up in class today whether the windmills' effect on birds has been addressed, so this could certainly become an issue for animal rights groups. If anyone out there has any information on this, I would be curious to learn more.

On that note, I am off to Starbucks to actually relax and drink coffee for pure enjoyment rather than for caffeine purposes. Have a wonderful evening and I hope to see you all "purpled out" tomorrow! Show your pride and support for JMU Football!!!!! :)

As the semester draws to a close...

It's hard to believe that tomorrow is our final day of class presentations and then the semester will be finished! Thinking back, I honestly had no idea what to expect out of this class when I signed up for it. However, I must admit that I learned a great deal about social movements and how they have effected change on our country over the years. This class opened my eyes to the numerous methods of studying these movements, from the characteristics of social movements to emotions of protest, symbolism of collective action, social movement theories, and so much more. What initially sounded like a dry topic that was simply going to fulfill one of the course requirements for my political communication minor (sorry Mike!), turned out to be very informative and thought provoking. Although I have always taken a pro-environment stance, this class (and especially the amount of research I conducted for my final paper), encouraged me to learn more about the environmental movement. Now I better understand the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes, the planning/structuring that is required, and the framing and other techniques that are employed in order to win possible participants over to the cause. Final presentations during the last two class meetings have shown that my fellow students have also learned quite a bit about the social movements that they chose to study. The knowledge that we have gained from this course has provided us with a deeper understanding of movements beyond what's on the surface. We now have the ability to analyze these movements and determine what methods have contributed to their success, or lack thereof. So, as the semester comes to a close, I realize that despite my initial lack of enthusiasm regarding the course subject, this class did indeed surpass my expectations.