Critical Reflection on Module and Project Learning

         At the beginning of this module, when I was writing my introductory letter, I mentioned that my goal for doing this module was to gain confidence in expressing myself in both writing and in speech. However, as the first few weeks went by, I started to see more and more weaknesses, such as weak paraphrasing and frequent stuttering, causing me to add more goals to achieve by the end of the module. As I reached the end of this Critical Thinking and Communicating module, the vast number of resources that were given to me and the guidance of Professor Brad allowed me to overcome my weaknesses, such as gaining confidence in self-expression and frequent stuttering, achieving my goals in this module.

        Firstly, in terms of communication, one of the things I learned was how to transform a report into a presentation while reducing the chances of it sounding like a report. This included adding elements such as stories in the beginning, to grab the audience’s attention, or asking the audience rhetorical questions for each section so that they can have an idea of the product. This resulted in the presentation capturing the audience’s attention and encouraging active participation. However, one of the ways I could have done better was to change the tone and pitch during a pitch to emphasise different parts of a presentation. Firstly, expressing excitement or enthusiasm about certain points should involve a slightly higher pitch to show the audience investment and passion relating to the topic. In contrast, using a lower pitch can enhance the sense of seriousness, so using it when delivering certain points can emphasise their importance. In my case, I only ended up talking in a higher pitch as I was really excited about the topic. However, the increased pitch still ended up sounding a bit monotonous even though it did not sound robotic. Thus, I would hope to be able to practice changing my pitch for my future oral presentations.

        For critical thinking, I learned many ways to organise my ideas and create focus statements for technical writing, learning things such as thesis and problem statements with tools such as PEEL and the Pyramid Principle. The thesis and problem statements helped to organise the bombardment of ideas by finding the focus of the ideas and presenting it to the reader while the PEEL format and the Pyramid principle helped to organise the information that was required to explain the point in the aforementioned thesis or problem statement. However, I still think that my skill in researching credible evidence to support my evaluations is still lacking. I hope that with the tools that Professor Brad has given me such as Google Scholar and the SiT Library, I will be able to find and cite evidence credible enough to support my evaluations.

        For the research project, I believe that I have evolved in terms of presentation skills. In the beginning, I used to do oral presentations with a “Let’s just get this over and done with” attitude, not thinking much about how to present effectively. With the resources given in the module for delivering presentations, I managed to learn how to vary my pitch for different sections of my presentation and make my presentation short but informative. In terms of my teammates, Kristine, and Hui Hao, I found out that they have great knowledge of making slides which enhanced our oral presentation. They also have respectable oral skills, which in turn resulted in giving me constructive feedback to improve my oral presentation. The presentation experience really changed my perspective of presentations, especially since I did not think much of them before. I ended up learning how to give a good oral presentation as well as learning the strengths and weaknesses of my groupmates to leverage the things they were good at for the presentation. Overall, I think the presentation and teamwork skills that I have learned during the research project will be useful in my future studies and workplace.