Final reflection on learning

Now it has come to the end of the course . Or perhaps it might be  only the beginning for us to  put all the knowledge that we have learnt into practice and become them one day.

In this course I found that my writing skill has improved dramatically compared to the way it was 3 months ago. This improvement is attributed to the amount of writing practices that we have employed through  various activities such as writing blog posts, writing lesson plan, the cover letter and resume , meeting minutes, proposal and emails to respective stakeholders.

Frankly, I enrolled into this course with the initial speculation that there would be a lot of discussions and verbal communications involved. However, I was taken by surprise to notice that there were also many writing tasks too. And I had to say it was such an enjoyable surprise .Since English is my second language and although I am required to write a fair bit in my course, personally I found that my writing skill hardly improved over the past year. Personally I guessed it was because I did not receive detailed feedbacks on my writings .Due to time constraint, learning has been one-directional most of the time. My tutors were  way too  busy  finishing the lesson requirement  and could not afford to correct each student on trivial shortcomings  such as wrong grammar or poor choice of vocabulary .These small  factors, if accumulated over time would  greatly affect the overall performance of the assignment. Nevertheless, I was also way ignorant to be able to eveluate my writing objectively. As a matter of fact, I have been repeating the same mistakes again in my writing  without noticing them.

In this class, having been introduced to the 7 C standard, I started to form a habit of asking  what is the purpose of my writing, does it sound coherent? Is it concise ? Is it clear?I find  these guideline questions are extremely useful in writing a good piece of essay. Furthermore through evaluating other’s work, I was exposure to a diverse range of writing styles from which I gradually withdrawn some useful tips of writing and build up my vocabulary.

I also like the lighthearted manner in which writing was infused into the course curriculum. Despite the  heavy workload, many  interactive activities such as  class discussions, peer feedbacks, peer teaching  etc  in replacement to thick textbooks and daunting compulsory readings required in conventional courses  have made  this class  much more pragmatic and enjoyable.

Lastly, it was the open-minded and mutual respective culture in classroom that helped me to express my ideas freely without being so self-conscious  about making mistakes. I would also like to express my gratitude to the facilitator-Brad and all of my beloved classmates for making ES2007S such a memorable experience.

Reflection on Oral Presentation (Post #5)

Seeing everyone smiled yesterday after the presentation has been a heartfelt moment. We smiled as we said “ yeah, it ‘s all over!” . We smiled as we knew we have done our best even though it was not perfect. Most importantly, we smiled out of the gratitude that we were given a chance to do something different from what we did before – writing a proposal and making people believe in it.

 

Reflecting on the OP, the first thing I would say is that Liberty was such a good combination of members. We all come from various faculties (Science, Engineering and Art) .Moreover, each of us possessed different talent and personalities that compensated each other’s weakness. Min was a natural team leader, straightforward and aggressive who brought a vibe of dynamic into the team. She would alarm us as we tended to divert from our main points. Shweta was pleasant, creative individual who usually brought up suggestions as we were stuck with a problematic issue. Dinh was a good listener and an IT expert who saved the three girls from the computer disaster. I was taken by surprised how well we got along with each other despite our diverse cultural background and how responsible everyone was, from responding the messages on face book to finishing one’s part on time. It was obvious that everyone put a serious effort into it and the presentation has been a wonderful piece of teamwork.

I guess being able to do that, the classroom culture which promoted constructive criticism, active listening and fostering intercultural communication more or less had a vital impact. Those EQ values that we listened and discussed in classroom have penetrated into our minds and changed the way we interacted with each other to some extent.

Personally, I was satisfied with what I did during the presentation.I practised before the presentation many times to resonate with the content and be able to get used to the layout of points that I needed to cover.Probably thanks to that, I was able to present naturally without referring to the slides so often.In order to mentally prepare for the presentation, I told myself it was not about how well I have to perform in front of other. Nevertheless,I took it simply as a chance to share my thoughts with my classmates and confidently persuade them in what I truly believe in. Honestly,there were times when I was too emotionally involved that I sidetracked from the main points, I guess my presentation should have been more concise and shorter to bring about a greater impact to the audiences

However, when I look back on this OP in the future, I would not remember much of the moment that we were up there presenting our ideas. Rather, I would remember the journey that we all have gone through as a team to achieve a common goal. It was the first heated team discussion to negotiate the topic of our proposal , the peer feedbacks, the first online meeting on Google which we took a while to figure how to use it, the very different perspectives that we always brought into group discussions, the serious rehearsals when Dinh was painfully glued to his script, and of course all the laughter and stress induced as we were walking through different phases of the project etc…that I would cherish the most. I like it because it was a learning process from which we had fun making mistakes and learn how to improve them by listening to other’s feedbacks. Through this process, I felt that I have enjoyed and learnt a lot from it .

 

This experience was a remarkable one that I will bring with me in my future endeavors.

 



 

ES2007S - Nov 2012