This course is designed to address the needs of students who fear speaking in public, as well as for those who desire to improve upon their present public speaking skills. Each week students are afforded the opportunity to give speeches in class as understanding is enhanced about general semantics, insight into human symbolic behavior and into human interaction through symbolic mechanisms from the disciplines of linguistics, philosophy, and cultural anthropology. The course also addresses evolving communication needs. Discussion will center on changing audiences, changing formats and changing technology. These will include topics on team presentations, delivery techniques, PowerPoint, video clips, creative properties and copyright issues.

This course will explore the interdisciplinary use of quantitative reasoning and statistics to explain aspects of the physical and social world. Course content will connect theory, methods of data collection and analysis to understand and apply descriptive and inferential statistics. In addition, students will evaluate the reasoning underlying explanations and assessments of social, economic and environmental problems.

The course will explore the role that movement, visual art, music and media can play in problem solving and in the resolution of internalized fear, conflicts or blocks. Through a variety of hands-on activities, field trips, readings, films/video and guest speakers, students will discover sources of imagery, sound and movement as tools to awaken their creative problem solving from two perspectives-as creator and viewer. Students interested in human services, media and education will find this course engaging. This course does not require any prerequisite art classes or training.

Students will collect oral histories and photographic images, read books and discuss in seminars, share data and insights, and post final presentations on the web in this course. This bicoastal, oral and photographic essay project that will document the impact of urban renewal on three urban communities in Tacoma/Seattle, Cape Town South Africa, and Buffalo, New York is open to students from the Tacoma and Olympia campuses through teleconferencing, and from the Center for Sustainable Communities and Civic Engagement at Daemon College in Buffalo. This program is especially designed for students interested in urban and community studies, Africana studies, photo essays and oral histories, urban ruins and revivals.

Learn to use powerful video editing software "Final Cut Pro HD" to create professional video content, revolutionary sound design, real-time motion graphics and next-generation DVD authoring. Edit virtually any format, from film to DV and native HDV to fully uncompressed HD. Create, manipulate and fix audio. Create eye-popping motion graphics, then author your finished product to DVD, complete with highly interactive title.

This class will focus on enhancing writing skills needed for communicating with a variety of academic and popular audiences. During the first session students will study composition with an emphasis on improving the quality of their research papers, opinion pieces, etc. They will also study the craft of effective and accurate editing. Regarding the latter, students will edit a poorly written journal entry that is part of a novel. They will identify the errors in grammar, spelling and syntax; they will then rewrite the entry in a manner that meets applicable standards. During the second session students will create a credible protagonist, do a variety of effective creative writing exercises and hold weekly readings of their work. Students may enroll for either first or second session or for the full summer session.