Listening can be defined has paying attention to a sound. Listening is far different from hearing. Your listening skills depend on how you listen.
There are two ways of listening, the active and passive.
Active: Active listening is a communication technique used in counseling, training and conflict resolution, which requires the listener to feed back what they hear to the speaker frequently. This is to show that you aren't distracted.
Passive: Passive Listening is listening without reacting allowing someone to
speak, without interrupting not doing anything else at the same time.
LISTENING I EXHIBIT:
I can't really say which listening ability I exhibit. The listening skill I exhibit is determined by my mood, season/time and the person i am interacting with.
Mood: When I am happy I reply actively but when I am sad I reply passively. Most time I do communicate with people when I am happy so it's hard to find me sad. Therefore, I feel i usually exhibit active listening.
Season/Time: Imagine someone calling you in the middle of the night like 3am. It's of great certainty that you won't reply the person with great passion. The time i listen to people contributes to how I listen.
Person: The individual i am listening to is also a factor in determining the listening skill i exhibit. Level of relationship comes into place and determines my listening skill
COMMUNICATION IS INEVITABLE, IRREVERSIBLE AND UNREPEATABLE.
Communication (from Latin commūnicāre, meaning "to share") is the activity of conveying information
through the exchange of ideas, feelings, intentions, attitudes,
expectations, perceptions or commands, as by speech, gestures, writings,
behaviour and possibly by other means such as electromagnetic, chemical
or physical phenomena. It is the meaningful exchange of information
between two or more participants (machines, organisms or their parts).
Communication requires a sender, a message,
a medium and a recipient, although the receiver does not have to be
present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of
communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in
time and space. Communication requires that the communicating parties
share an area of communicative commonality. The communication process is
complete once the receiver understands the sender's message.
Communication
However, communication is irreversible, inevitable and unrepeatable.
Irreversible: Communication is irreversible in the sense that once the source says
something, they cannot take it back whether it is what they intended to
say or not. That is why it is important to stop and think before we
speak or send a message. You can never undo what you said. Communication is like a skyscraper. When destroyed or collapses(said out) it is impossible to have that building back except reconstructing a new one(irreversibility).
A collapsed building
Inevitable: Communication is in two forms; Verbal and Non-verbal communication. Verbal involves the use of words while non-verbal involves the use of body language. Communication is inevitable means your communicating without even
realizing you are. Even with a blank stare, someone somewhere is interpreting your thought as their own. Like the book says, there is no
way you cannot NOT respond to someone, even by staying quiet that
itself is an action and a response. An example is when you scream at
someone and they say nothing back to you but you see their eyes water
and start to cry. They didn't say anything back but their body language
told you that they were hurt or sad.
Unrepeatable: Communication is unrepeatable is more like 'you never get a second
chance to make a first impression' I would say that the way the audience
receives the message the first time it is conveyed to him/her is not
the same way he will receive the same message if it is conveyed the
second time. Communication is unrepeatable means that when something happens and you
try to reenact a situation of how it happened, it won't come out the way
it really happened, it maybe close but never exactly the same. An
example of this is if you and your mom get into an argument and your
trying to show your friend how it happened, if she wasn't there in person
she won't know exactly how it was.
Perception can defined as the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sense organs.For example, vision involves light striking the retina of the eye, smell is mediated by odor molecules, and hearing involves pressure waves. Perception is not the passive receipt of these signals, but is shaped by learning, memory, expectation, and attention. Perception involves these "top-down" effects as well as the "bottom-up" process of processing sensory input.
The "bottom-up" processing transforms low-level information to
higher-level information (e.g., extracts shapes for object recognition).
The "top-down" processing refers to a person's concept and expectations
(knowledge), and selective mechanisms (attention)
that influence perception. Perception depends on complex functions of
the nervous system, but subjectively seems mostly effortless because
this processing happens outside conscious awareness.
Since the rise of experimental psychology in the 19th Century, psychology's understanding of perception has progressed by combining a variety of techniques. Psycho-physics quantitatively describes the relationships between the physical qualities of the sensory input and perception. Sensory neuroscience studies the brain mechanisms underlying perception. Perceptual systems can also be studied computationally, in terms of the information they process. Perceptual issues in philosophy
include the extent to which sensory qualities such as sound, smell or
color exist in objective reality rather than in the mind of the
perceiver.
Although the senses were traditionally viewed as passive receptors, the study of illusions and ambiguous images has demonstrated that the brain's perceptual systems actively and pre-consciously attempt to make sense of their input. There is still active debate about the extent to which perception is an active process of hypothesis testing, analogous to science, or whether realistic sensory information is rich enough to make this process unnecessary.
The perceptual systems of the brain
enable individuals to see the world around them as stable, even though
the sensory information is typically incomplete and rapidly varying.
Human and animal brains are structured in a modular way, with different areas processing different kinds of sensory information. Some of these modules take the form of sensory maps,
mapping some aspect of the world across part of the brain's surface.
These different modules are interconnected and influence each other. For
instance, the taste is strongly influenced by its odor.
Experience:
During a physics class, my teacher asked us to compare this two lines without the considering the arrow, he asked us to determine which one is longer. I allowed visual perception to occur. I chose (B) and most people did the same. My teacher then said we should measure using a ruler, that was when I realized the lines are equal.
There's this saying look before you leap. It's natural to fall for your senses as suppose to using/considering facts.
In 2006/2007, approximately 16 percent of all elementary and secondary public school students (or 7.7 million students)
attended high poverty schools.
Education in African countries are encountering various problems as a result of a number of reasons
CORRUPTION IN EDUCATION:
A 2010 Transparency International report, with research gathered from 8,500 educators and parents in Ghana, Madagascar, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Uganda, found that education is being denied to African children in incredibly large numbers.
A lack of parent involvement, especially as an overseer of government
activities also leads to enormous corruption. This was most often found
to be because parents and communities feel as though they lack any kind
of power in regard to their child's education. In Uganda only 50% of parents believe that they have the power to influence decisions regarding the education of their child. In Morocco, just 20% of parents believed they held any sort of power.
The unavailability and incompleteness of records in schools and
districts prevents the documentation and prevention of corrupt
practices. The African Education Watch conducted surveys all over the
continent and identified the three most common practices of corruption:
Embezzlement of school funds: In the study, Transparency International found that 64% of the schools surveyed on the continent published no financial information at all.
Power abuse: Another major problem is incompetent management.
The report found that in many schools the little resources they did
have were being wasted or lost. Overall, 85% of schools across all
countries had either deficient accounting systems or none at all. In
Morocco, just 23% of head teachers received training in financial
management, despite being responsible for budgets. The TI report found
that there was sexual abuse in schools from teachers. The TI report also
found that many schools were plagued by teacher absenteeism and
alcoholism.
Without this basic education, the report found it was nearly
impossible to go on to high school or college. African children are
missing this link that allows them to have a chance in trade or to go
beyond their villages
POVERTY:
Sometimes people do feel lack of education causes poverty while others feel it's poverty that creates lack of education, but both are still the same. Poor education=poverty.
Illegal collection of fees: One part of their research
focused on of so-called registration fees. Parents from every country
surveyed reported paying even though, by law, primary schooling is free.
The report found that the number of parents forced to pay these illegal
accounting fees ranged from 9% in Ghana, to 90% in Morocco.
An average of 44% of parents still report paying skill fees in the
study. The average fee cost $4.16, a major expense for families in
countries like Madagascar, Niger and Sierra Leone.
CASE STUDY
Nigeria
Academic Staff Union of Universities (a.k.a. ASUU) strike history: