My Critical Reflection

Before taking this module, I thought that this module would be like the general modules I have taken back in Polytechnic and that it would be dreadful and hard to handle. After briefly reading through the course outline and the materials from the student portal, I realised that the lessons and the assignments required from me were not as foreign as I have been exposed to them when I was taking my diploma. Personally, I am not very confident in my writing and presentation skills as I do not have a strong foundation in English and I thought this will be a good opportunity to hone my writing skills as it will be an essential going into university and my career. After going through this trimester of critical thinking and communicating, I realised that my writing and presentation skills have improved and I have gotten a grasp of how to structure different writings that I will have to write in the future.

Module Learning
Throughout this trimester, I got the opportunity to expose myself to different writings such as an introductory email, reader response analysis and a technical design proposal report. This taught me the different structures, flow and tone every type of writing should have and gave us opportunities to write our own and get feedback from my classmates and professor to improve on our writing. The biggest achievement for me is being able to write a full design proposal report using the writing skills and techniques taught such as using the PEEL framework in establishing my points. A big room for improvement for me still is the usage of words in a formal writing as I will tend to use fragments.
Another key takeaway from this module is learning how to fully utilize search engines such as google, google scholar and online libraries and Ais such as ChatGPT to aid my research to getting credible information. With information from the web, I learnt that we must reference the sources we cited the information from to give them credit otherwise it will be considered as plagiarism. This module taught me how to use the appropriate method to reference the sources I get my information from.

Project Learning
For my team’s project, I took on the role of being the writer and someone who runs and keeps the ideas flowing to improve our project. This allowed me to set the pace of my group and being able to come up with a step-by-step approach to work towards our oral presentation and technical report submission. Through group discussions I learnt how to communicate my ideas effectively to my groupmates and to take in their opinions and ideas. Leading up to our Oral Presentation, we did up the slides collaboratively and I made sure our formatting and the flow of slides and speeches were smooth. For our technical report, I am still learning the skill of being able to read through my group’s contributions and making sure the report is written in a uniform format and with one voice.

Throughout this module, the skills I have learnt will be extremely useful moving ahead in university and my career. Although I may not be the best at both presenting and writing but having improved in these aspects, I have gotten more confident in myself.