Critical Reflection

Module Reflection

At the start of this module, I set myself two learning goals, performing public speaking confidently and learning more effective communication skills in order to express my opinions with sound reasoning and be able to get my point across to others. Regarding the first point on speaking confidently, before this course, I was nervous when presenting in front of people, while practising my presentation beforehand did help me to present better I was still not completely confident while presenting. The problem I had that led to my lack of confidence while presenting was the lack of knowledge on some of the topics I was presented with previously. So based on this issue, I believe that if I studied more deeply about the topics I was speaking on, I would be able to speak more confidently. I believe that I have met this goal, for example during the oral presentation I was able to project my voice clearly and presented my points confidently. I believe that I was able to speak confidently because I researched more deeply on the topics that I was presenting and because of the knowledge I was able to answer questions about my topic when asked. Regarding my second learning goal of learning more effective communication skills, some things that will hinder communication skills are speaking Singlish, using filler words and reading the slides during a presentation. The cause of these habits during presentations is due to not being conscious of what we are speaking about or content, not being prepared sufficiently before presenting. In order to reduce these habits, I believe that preparing sufficient content as mentioned in the first goal and consciously thinking about what I am going to say next will reduce the chances of falling back into undesirable habits. I believe that I was able to apply this knowledge during my presentation and was able to communicate my topic effectively.

Project Reflection

During this module, I learned about how to write a technical report and all of its different intricacies. Even though the report might look simple at first, there were many things to take note of while writing the report. For example, the overall report needs to meet the set requirements while being cohesive and having details that will explain the topic to the readers. In order to meet these goals we had to learn how to verify the credibility of sources that we were citing, for example, using academic articles and Google Scholar generally reliable sources of information, however, if other sources are used I would need to check who the author is and if the topic they are writing about is in their field of expertise. I believe that knowing how to check if a source is reliable is a useful skill to learn, as it can be applied in daily life or in the workplace to ensure that we are not spreading fake or unreliable information to other people or our co-workers. Another important part of the report is being able to connect all the information collected cohesively so that the reader is able to understand the topic at hand. For example, if our report is just all the compiled information about the issues without any linking or flow of information, the reader will be confused about what is written in the report. In order to prevent this from happening in our report, we ensured that we followed the report format and ensured our information and explanations were connected together by using conjunctions and linking words. This component is very critical as it allows the reader to read through the entire report concurrently without being confused by a sudden shift in the topic at hand. This useful skill can be applied in the workplace or in daily life to ensure that we can get our points across to other people clearly.