For the last official post of the semester, I will be reviewing the journey through my FOP.
I thought FOP was pretty straightforward - there was sufficient time to prepare even though I was the first group. In my opinion, the rehearsals without using slides were really beneficial as it allowed me to discover what I did not know about my own content, and allowed me to learn how to make my presentation flow naturally. There's always the temptation to structure a presentation using PowerPoint, but this method is not as good as starting with a piece of paper (for me, at least).
I felt I did well enough during the actual delivery. During the Q&A session especially, I felt confident enough to handle any question thrown at me with ease, crafting up a reply on the spot even though I did not prepare for such questions (about my recommendations). It was a good learning experience - it allows a person to think on the spot, as well as how to subtly side-step certain issues you do not want to go into ;)
In terms of slides, I still admire the work of those doing Issue A as well (you guys know who you are!). For a guy like me, coming up with beautiful slides is truly a difficult job. Perhaps using a simple theme (think along the lines of Apple) would be better for us!
Now it is the end of BizComm, and I hope everyone has picked up something useful from it. I sure did!
Monday, 15 April 2013
Week 8: Reflection on Report Writing
Hi! After a long break, I'm back to blogging again!
I was assigned to do Issue A: whether NUS faculty should initiate/accept friend requests from students on Facebook.
On analysis of the topic, it was not as easy as it looked - in my opinion, it actually turned out to be one of the harder topics. Plenty of thinking and preparation time was needed in order to justify the recommendations. It may seem easy to just recommend that NUS faculty and students should not add each other as friends on Facebook, but it had to be justified in a very concrete way for the purposes of the report.
In the end, I designed a survey to gather students' opinions on the matter. True enough, while most did not want to be friends with teachers on Facebook, many felt that there were benefits towards the use of Facebook (but not Facebook friendship!). This is where one of my recommendations, the use of Facebook pages, comes in.
To be honest, I spent a whole lot of time thinking about the content and how to organise the report. I also found out how to get a table of contents to generate automatically using Word's formatting (hurray!).
Reviewing the comments I received, it appeared that my efforts did pay off. It was clear and well organised, and it seemed like the marker liked my preview sentences at the start of each section (it was a calculated gamble - I was right up against that word count). The findings were generally relevant, and there were positive comments about the conclusions.
The only significant issue was the recommendations - logical but not innovative. Still, it was also a calculated move - I did not want to 'step out' form the norm, and I felt that recommendations should be logical rather than creative or innovative.
All in all, a very interesting and insightful experience. I now know that it is a really difficult job to churn out a good report!
I was assigned to do Issue A: whether NUS faculty should initiate/accept friend requests from students on Facebook.
On analysis of the topic, it was not as easy as it looked - in my opinion, it actually turned out to be one of the harder topics. Plenty of thinking and preparation time was needed in order to justify the recommendations. It may seem easy to just recommend that NUS faculty and students should not add each other as friends on Facebook, but it had to be justified in a very concrete way for the purposes of the report.
In the end, I designed a survey to gather students' opinions on the matter. True enough, while most did not want to be friends with teachers on Facebook, many felt that there were benefits towards the use of Facebook (but not Facebook friendship!). This is where one of my recommendations, the use of Facebook pages, comes in.
To be honest, I spent a whole lot of time thinking about the content and how to organise the report. I also found out how to get a table of contents to generate automatically using Word's formatting (hurray!).
Reviewing the comments I received, it appeared that my efforts did pay off. It was clear and well organised, and it seemed like the marker liked my preview sentences at the start of each section (it was a calculated gamble - I was right up against that word count). The findings were generally relevant, and there were positive comments about the conclusions.
The only significant issue was the recommendations - logical but not innovative. Still, it was also a calculated move - I did not want to 'step out' form the norm, and I felt that recommendations should be logical rather than creative or innovative.
All in all, a very interesting and insightful experience. I now know that it is a really difficult job to churn out a good report!
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