When I first received the notification email of the module
intake for this trimester, I was wondering why do we need to take a module
namely “Critical thinking and communication”? Isn’t it every day that every person
is already in thinking and in communication? It’s such a natural born matter even
a baby who doenst know how to speak but still they can communicate with others
via their body language or voice expression. Then what is the goal for us to study
in this module? What is the intake about? How does it relate to engineering courses?
I am curious about it, and it thus creates some interest in me to find out
more.
The more I go in depth about this module, the more I agree
that, yes, we need to learn about communication and think critically. Effective
communication either via writing or speaking will reflect your personality. Good
use the communication tools can help to achieve your goal via critical
thinking. Your thinking which makes you different from anybody else in the
world. I am so glad that eventually all these communications and thinking tools
can be learned, trained, and improved. This is why we are taking the module. I strongly
believe that the learning outcome will not just apply in the engineering
course. But it does apply in our daily life as well.
In real life, we can see different cases happening around. Most
of time, people can speak doesn’t mean that he/she can speak well. As the words
they speak can deliver rightfully to others who are listening are always unknown.
Same goes for writing. The module teaches us to think in depth, dive into every
topic discussed, and make the content more interesting and valuable. The module
also teaches us techniques about how to communicate effectively via oral and
writing. The key word is always ‘effectively’!
Besides the module concept of learning, we had also given
the task in team work to write a technical report. This is a nightmare for me
as I know that writing is always my weakness. Not to say we must write in
proper language, with proper citation and references quote. Technical report presentation
must be a very formal way of writing.
After studying in this module, I started to tell myself that
writing can never be my weak point forever. This is how we learn to think
critically. Assumptions that underlie our thoughts and actions can be changed
to more inclusive and integrated.
I am so glad can learn together with all my teammates. They
all have different strengths. Each of us contributed our efforts to make up the
delivery of our technical report. Besides technical knowledge is earned, I had
also earned inner growing from team works process in school. It works slightly
different from school and work.
In school teamwork is more theoretical. Everything is
presented via writing or oral presentation only. But when comes to work, it is
more on actual result, whether it is practically workable. At work, profitable is
also the key issue to consider with. This is the huge difference between
academic and workplace. But I do believe that whatever we learned from academic
somehow will apply sooner in work place one day and maybe that is the factor to
determine whether the project can success or not.
Lastly but not least, critical thinking and communication
module is a great module to learn with.
