Module Learning
Before this module, I was confident that my writing and communication skills were above average and required minimal improvements to perfect both skills. To me, both writing formally and presenting in front of others were simple and could do with little to no effort. However, after going through 13 weeks of communication and critical thinking module, I finally realised how foolish, overconfident and wrong I was in my skills.
In this trimester, I was exposed to writing formal academic reports with tight deadlines, which were quite demanding as I had to do plenty of research to have a better and deeper understanding of specific topics. Soon, I felt my writing and research skills were lacking and unable to meet the university standards. Nonetheless, attending this communication module helped me to write more proficiently and fluently.
Professor Blackstone provided online resources and delivered well-planned in-class content that was proven to be extremely useful and both of them became my go-to references if I encountered any issues while writing my reports. Other than that, I was taught the writing conventions where I was required to strictly adhere to the rules in my reports. It was crucial in academic writing as all of us needed to give credit to the authors of the articles that we took references to. All this definitely would help me in my journey in SIT and even in my future workplace.
In addition, I started to overcome my issue in presenting where I always had difficulties in conveying my ideas to the audience. By making observations on how Professor Blackstone adopted the use of tone, pauses and enunciation, body language in class allowed me to try out the same concepts during the discussions. From there, I learned to freely express my thoughts in spoken words, capture the audience’s attention and let them understand my conveyed messages. This essentially paves the way for me to speak more fluently with people.
Project Learning
For the research project, I was given the role of the writer in my team. My tasks were to take notes of discussions within my team and convert them into meetings and content in pour report. At the start, it was challenging as we came from different educational backgrounds and had different ideas from one another. However, through discussions and effective communication, we were able to decide on a single research topic and go ahead with it.
Other than that, it was crucial to be open-minded towards every member’s ideas and feedback as they might provide some unusual insights or perspectives that one might not think about before. During the presentation, I felt that I could apply what I learned in class, be able to give a good presentation and work together with my teammates to answer the questions in Q&A sessions. This experience will be extremely helpful in working as a team in my further studies at SIT and also in my future workplace.
Thus I would like to thank Professor Brad for his detailed guidance as well as his expertise, for creating such a wonderful and insightful learning experience.
