Ethan's Critical Reflection

Module learning:

To a large extent, I believed that I have met the goals I set for myself at the start of the course. I hope that I have improved in both my speaking and writing through this course and gained more confidence to speak in front of others compared to the start of the course. Also, I believe that my improvement in both public speaking and report writing will be helpful to my improvement in the future. These are essential skills that I will be using throughout the entirety of my career as an engineer as we will be giving speeches, writing emails and reports on the agenda of our job on a daily basis.

Compared to the beginning of the course, I am capable of articulating more clearly in front of a crowd because I have learnt how to use the skills that I learnt in the course to improve. This does not only showcase the way I speak but also the confidence I have built upon after learning from this course. I used to have many habits that are considered unsuitable for a professional career. However, after going through this course, I learn the way we should present and communicate with one another in a professional setting.

Another important part of this course that I had hoped to improve on would also be my writing skills and the way I think when analysing certain subjects. During this course, I learnt the importance of citations and learn how even a single error is considered unacceptable in our workplace as it may look extremely unprofessional if a client receives any document that is filled with language and grammatical mistakes.

Hence, I believe to a large extent that I have achieved the goals I set for myself. However, I believe that I still have much to improve on as I am still not a perfect speaker and will make many mistakes in my presentations and am still not able to do citations for different sources well. However, I do believe that my goals have been met as I have shown a great improvement in both my writing and presentation skills through Paul elder and Garr Reynold frameworks.

 Project learning:

For my research project, I have learnt and honed my writing, presentation and critical thinking skills as they are the building blocks of what the team project entails. Also, I have learnt how important is it for us to work as a team to build a team that showcases strong teamwork.

Focusing on teamwork, I have learned that we need to be able to coordinate well with each other to get the job well done and also need to compromise on certain agendas we may want as the opinion of each team members count. Also, It is important that we show accountability to each other as the completion of a project is the responsibility of the entire group.

Another important skill that I picked up during the project was the skill to analyse the articles that we as a group and break them down into parts using the Paul elder framework. This will allow us to properly compartmentalize the thinking process and come up with a better solution for the different problems that we are tasked to solve. This will in turn help us better enrich our content and write a better report.

Finally, during the group project, we have a presentation that we need to do where we used the Garr Reynolds framework to help us come up with ideas to build upon in our presentation. Also, we learn the importance of controlling our audience’s attention during a presentation and how we should use slides to assist us when we are speaking instead of letting the slides lead us.

In conclusion, despite the fun we have as a group, I believe that I have picked up many important skills.