Critical thinking reflection

 

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.