Critical Reflection

 Module Learning

At the start of this course, I desired to learn how to give comprehensive feedback and how to foster a better social environment for group work. Initially, I felt uneasy giving feedback to others in fear of worsen their work instead of improving it. However, that feeling slowly faded with the help of the constant exchanges of feedback that I experienced throughout this course. Those exchanges being within the blogging groups, mock presentations, feedback between reader response groups and feedback between tech report groups. Furthermore, I now feel inclined to give feedback to people when I notice areas that could be improved, be it in terms of clarity, tone, use of evidence, etc... This came as a surprise even to myself, when I went out of my way to give Hui Hao (he's not in my group for presentations) more feedback outside of class to improve the persuasiveness of the use of his statistics and how to better contextualize his assertions. Also, I improved on giving more courteous feedback through the guidance provided by my professor. I learnt that to give courteous I need to balance positive and negative feedback to prevent completely discouraging the recipient. Additionally, the language I use must not be accusatory like starting sentences with "You did this" or "You did that" and instead use more indirect language that shifts the focus to the problem instead of the person. Thus, I felt that my learning objectives regarding giving comprehensive feedback has been very satisfactory. 

Next, fostering a better social environment for group work. Having worked with groups of different sizes through out this module, my improvement for fostering a better social environment for group work as skill is still up in the air for me. It is a skill that I find tough to execute as there are many factors that prevent everyone from being on the same page like the level of priority that the project holds for each group member varies, leading to each member having a different rate of work completion. Despite how disappointingly little progress I have made in this area, I at least have some what of a clue as to where to look to improve. Those areas being, to approach people that have a lot of experience collaborating with others on projects like mentors or my seniors and to read up on online resources available that pertain to communications within groups.

Project learning

One area that I want to reflect on is the presentation for the tech report project. I have never given a major group presentation before, let alone something as big as a proposal to stakeholders for an implementation of a revolutionary product to combat an issue a massive company is facing. Despite that, I believe my team and I did pretty well. 

Through out the whole process of preparing for the presentation, I learnt that it can be rewarding to help others improve in their areas of weakness like Hao Wen with his presentation skills and my group members' use of slides. Also, I learnt that despite there being a clear difference in presenting ability, my group mates were still able provided me with effective criticism on my execution of linking points together, reshaping the mentality that I don't stand to gain anything from helping others improve. Furthermore, I now believe that learning can be improved so much more when done in a collaborative manner. 

Apart from learning views, I changed they way I approach presentations. One important aspect of a presentations is the digestibility of information being absorbed by the reader. Improving this aspect was made easy with the help of the online resources recommended through this module like the evidence-assertion method. The exhaustive online materials have taught me the usefulness of images in place of words, the brains lack of ability to process the hearing of words and the reading of words at the same time, the need for change of pace according to the density and importance of information being presented, etc... All in all, this presentation and the preparation leading up to it has changed my perspective on collaborative learning and improved my approach to designing the technical aspect of my presentations.