Critical Reflection

Module Learning 

 

At the start of this course, we are tasked to type a formal letter and ask what we want to achieve or learn from this course. My goals are to improve my English language and presentation skills, in the past 13 weeks it really broadens my knowledge by using the Paul-Elder framework and 7Cs of communication on how to look out for the errors and the format used when writing a letter. By using Paul-Elder's critical thinking, I can convey my ideas and purpose to the recipient that read my letter. In the reader response essay, I have learned how to research the relevant topic by using google scholar and paraphrasing the article. Drafting the essay thesis statement, I require to know in-depth about my research and explain the “idea, gap, and goal” which helps me convey my idea to my readers. All the research findings are required to cite the article and sources, and I have learned how to apply APA 7th Edition citations to my essay. After learning this APA standard, I appreciate this format of professionalism as before I just cite with online tools. Our next Assignment is to design research projects, that we need to research and draft a technical report. By implementing the skills, I have learned so far in the class I am able to draft a proper technical report and this knowledge can use for our future or upcoming reports.  

 

Project Learning 

 

As I have done the technical report as a group, we all have our differences in view and knowledge but we work it out as we discuss and debate when we are doing our research. I think this is a healthy session discussion as we can grow our minds when looking at others' view of points. As we progress and help each other with our research, we all agree on the solutions we found. With this progression we finally start doing the slides for our presentation, we spit up the slides evenly so each of us has key point to present. On the day of the presentation, I am very nervous which makes me forget what I am going to say as I tend to look at the slides most of the time to see what I can say during that time. All of us do several trial runs of the presentation before the real presentation but some of us still made some errors in the presentation, which all of us are okay with considering overall we still did quite well. In the last part of the presentation, we are to feedback or comment on other groups, which I found is a good session in that we can get feedback on how audiences view us and vice-versa. After the presentation, we can focus on the technical report as the past weeks' lesson learned on how to write a formal report. The report requires more in-depth detail than our slides, we need to cite all the sources into APA standards. The APA standards have a lot of requirements to meet for different situations of format, we need to cite according to those formats. All the figures and tables need to be in APA standards also, which I learned a lot in this technical report. 

 

I really felt I improve a lot as I learned in this module and the lesson are interactive, you don't feel boring in the class. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Blackstone as he makes the lesson very engaging. Every lesson he will ask us to recital our assignments to train our presentation skill and everyone have their turn, which helps us to build confidence in a way before our presentation. Thank you for the valuable lesson.