At the start of the module, the goals I set for myself are to improve my communication skills, report writing skills and most importantly my language in general. After 13 weeks of attending UCS1001 MEC modules, I am on the path to achieving my goals, I cannot say that I have reached the goal as I am still not confident in my presentation and communication skill. In this module, I have also learned about critical thinking and critical reflection. Critical thinking is a way of thinking about things in a different way to arrive at the best possible solution in our daily life and our working environment. Critical reflection normally applies after we come to a solution where we identify, and question the issues, our feelings and actions and see if the solution is suitable for the situation. For example, during the summary reader response task, we need to identify what the author or article trying to tell us and how we are able to improve and implement it into our proposal. After we finished our critical thinking, we need to reflect and read through what we have written and see whether there is a better solution and whether the solution is viable. In order to further improve my communication skill and critical thinking skills, I started watching debating shows to learn how the speaker speak like their tones, sentence structure, gesture and facial expression. After, watching the show, I will try to present in front of the mirror and record my voice to replay it and see whether is convincing or not. I also start to read articles and do critical thinking to identify, the purpose and message of the article.
Around week 9, we are split into groups of 3-4 to work on our technical report. At first, we try to implement healthcare drones in Singapore, but after reflecting, we determined that it is not viable because we notices that drones are controlled in Singapore with lots of restrictions. After much discussion and reflection, we decided to go with smart shelves because during our research we found out that most of the workers at NTUC are mostly elderly. During the times that I work with my group member, I learned that different people have different ways of thinking and different solutions will occur. We also need to reflect and voice out our opinion about the solution. When the topic is being decided on we split the topic into different parts and decide who is going to work on which topic. When writing the report, I have learned that we need to communicate our idea with one another so that the whole report makes sense and the flow go smoothly. Days before the presentation, we did the slide and prepared our script of what we wanted to say. After that, we noticed that the duration of each presenter is not even which will affect the presentation in general. I have learned that the slide for the presentation should not be wordy, the duration of each presentor need to be even and the way we present need to be formal. Before I take this module, my presentation and communication skills are horrible as I like to work alone and do all the reports by myself, but now I am able to work as a team to make sure we help one another to speed up the process, learn a new idea, ways of thinking and new perspectives.
