Critical Reflection

 

Critical Reflection

 Module Reflection

At the start of the course, I set goals to improve my use of English in both the written and verbal aspects. Before the course, I personally feel that my command in English were subpar and contained a large use of ‘singlish’ in my day-to-day communication with friends and family. That was not my only concern before the course, one of my weaker areas is presentations. I have done presentations ever since secondary school but up till the point where I started taking this course, I frequently feel tensed and nervous due to my own insecurities of others judging the way I speak or if my presentation was going to be boring. All these negative areas led me to think about how I am going to portray myself in the future when I join the professional working industry.

After going through this communications course, I feel that I have made great improvements. First would be my written English. Through the course, I gained knowledge in areas like the inappropriate use of comma splices and sentences fragmentations. Looking back at my written work, I realized these mistakes in my essays. Now, I frequently check and ensure that I do not make the same errors. Secondly, my confidence in presentations have improved because of the feedbacks given to me by my lecturer and classmates. The feedbacks gave me tips on how I can be more engaging and portray myself professionally with confidence. I believe with more practice on presentations, I can be an even better presenter. Lastly are the critical thinking skills I have gained. An example such as the Paul Elder framework acted as a template for me to list down my ideas and thoughts. It is a good way to think through thoroughly before voicing out my ideas and thoughts to make smart and appropriate choices. Moving forward, I will continue to practice the knowledge and skills I have learnt to further improve them for future use.

 

Project Reflection

Through this course, we had the chance to come up with a proposal and technical report as a team. In the project I did with my team, I gained the experience of holding a presentation as a group. Presentations require skills like maintaining eye contact with the audience, using proper gestures, and learning how to properly hand over the presentation to my groupmates. These skills are not easily mastered, but with enough practice, I believe it will slowly improve as time passes by.  As for the technical report, my team and decided to split up our work equally among ourselves and research on our own areas. I was tasked to do research on the differences between lithium ion and lithium-ion polymer batteries, and how using lithium-ion polymer batteries would be a better choice to increase the efficiency of Spot the robot dog as a delivery robot. This report requires good teamwork because we are all relying on each other to ensure that we did enough research on our areas so that we can properly collate our findings to write up a good technical report. In terms of writing skills, I used what I learnt in the course like the use of proper sentences, structures, and critical thinking skills to list down the research I did in the technical report. This allowed me to think thoroughly about what I needed in the report and write it down professionally.

In conclusion, this course has helped me to improve in areas like my language use, presentation skills and writing skills. With all these skills gained, it will definitely help me feel more confident in the future being in the working world where I will have to do presentations and write reports.