Reflection on my own teamwork and communication process throughout CG1413 and CG1102

It is nearly 4 months since I started taking two modules, CG1413 and CG1102. From then on, I have gone through a lot of meetings, presentations, and now, it is a very good time to reflect on how I have improved myself.

First of all, I have to say that the combination of two modules CG1413 and CG1102 looks perfect, because it helped students individually improve a lot of critical skills that we need for future usage. We have written a lot of reflections which strengthens our writing skills, we had some presentations which are totally good chances to improve some weaknesses like confidence, grammatical errors while talking, etc. Last but not least, the programming project which is issued by CG1413 and CG1102 was really realistic and helped us a lot in defining who we will be in the future. For me, after this semester, I felt I have improved both my writing and presentation skills though it still had rooms for improvements. I also felt more interested in the major I’m taking thanks to the project.

Secondly, such combination created a chance for everyone to work together, by that all of us can experience the principle of teamwork and communication. For me, such experiences are really valuable. I still remembered how embarrassed I was when I tried to express my ideas in the first time we conduct the meeting. At this time, I sometimes found difficult discussing with my teammates due to my poor expression. And sometimes, it was really hard to explain my teammates that their solutions didn’t work correctly. Throughout the whole course, I felt that I am now able to interact with my friends better by using interpersonal and intercultural communication skills. Furthermore, through many projects, I am trained to work in teams that are heterogeneous in both culture and working styles. As Dr Colin Tan said, the real world teams are quite similar like this, so such combination prepared me a lot to work in such teams in the future. Last but not least, thanks to these modules, I have more chances to make friends, which in turn help me increase my networking.

In conclusion, I feel that I have improved a lot since this semester started. However, it doesn't mean that I stop practicing the communication and teamwork skills. Such critical skills are extremely helpful for future projects. Lastly, I want to thank all the CG1413 and CG1102 staffs, especially Ms.Brenda for giving me many useful advices, my CG1102 and CG1413 teammmates for working with me.

Reflection on the Oral Presentation 2

Last Thursday, our group had an oral presentation for the problem-solving project of module CG1413. The main objective of this project is to raise the awareness of the impact of diet change on global warming. After all the pressure surrounding us for a long time, now it is perfect time for reflection.

It seems that I had a great improvement compared to the last oral presentation with the project CG1102, not only because this time I spent more time for preparation but also because I felt more confident. First of all, about the content, I have to say that more attractive animations were added into my slides that makes my presentation energetic and interesting. I was also able to keep track of my speech by emphasizing some important points as well as interacting with the audience. In such a long presentation, the key to keep audience pay attention is to combine both informative and funny elements harmonically; and personally to some extent, I think I successfully did it. Furthermore, I also spent a lot of time for my presentation content, which in the previous I missed. That’s the reason that though I didn’t use index cards to support my speech, I felt quite confident and wasn’t lost during the presentation. Last but not least, by rehearsing with my teammate few times, I finally found some resonance between my part and others.

However, there are still some parts that I need to improve a lot. Firstly, though this time I tried to speak lower and control my volume as well that made my pronunciation clearer, sometimes during the speech I was awkward when making some grammar errors. Moreover, my gesture and eye contact were still not good enough to grasp all the audience’s attention. I strongly believe that such imperfections were mostly due to the fact that this presentation was only the second time for me. Sometimes during the speech, I felt not confident and that affected my fluency. I hope that by practicing a lot, I will be able to improve such weaknesses gradually.

Overall, I think that our group had a good performance. Firstly, the delegation of tasks for the presentation is appropriate that helped each individuals show his best. Secondly, by rehearsing few times before, we achieved a high level of cohesiveness between different presenters ’s content . Of course, there are still rooms for us to improve, here I want to focus on the consistency in each part’s slides. There are some differences about the layout, font size which I think we can get better in the next time.

Finally, I want to say thank you to all of my teammates: Kai Ren, Duy, Geetika and Michael. Without each of us, we couldn’t finish the project at all. Thank you guys !

Reflection on our CG1102 project meeting

Last week, our group had a meeting to prepare for the CG1102 project presentation. The main purpose of this meeting is that each member has to share ideas about how the design should be, discuss with each other to assign equal tasks for everyone.

This project basically aims to introduce us with the CEG Hypermarket Inventory Control and Monitoring System (CICMS). Typically, our task is to deal with a large multi-national supermarket chain with millions of different products, and the design we create should enable users to do some kind of functionalities like manage products, update database and generate some Statistics.

After discussion, all of us agreed to create a design that fulfil all requirements. First of all, we need to create a class Product which should include some attributes and some methods to call the calculation. Then, a class ProductDatabase will be created, storing an unlimited number of products by using Linked List. Later, we divide all the functions needed into three classes, all of them will inherit from the class ProductDatabase. Finally, the class User Interface will make use of all the classes mentioned to prompt the user for actions.

About task allocation, I will be in charge of the first two classes, Product and ProductDatabase while Cornelius will manage the three classes of functionality. Lastly, Eno will do the user interface class. Actually, all of us find this project challenging. The reason for this is that though the design seems well-defined enough, it is the corporation between each member that matters. Mostly, because we don’t need to know other’s implementation due to the purpose of ADT( Abstract Data Type), it is really crucial to have very clear specification for each functionality as well as UI class.

Personally, I think that our meeting still miss some key points. While the design is overall good, we haven’t declared clearly how each class will interact with each other. Part of the reason arise from the fact that some descriptions of functions required is still sketchy so we are quite confused about some specifications, but I think that in the near future, all of us should need more time to work together to make our design better.

Resolving interpersonal communication

Nowadays, it is really hard to communicate without conflicts. Sometimes, such conflict may be just a quarrel, but sometimes it can also be a big dispute that can end a relationship. For this reason, it is not how many conflicts that matters, it is how people deal with such conflicts. Let’s see my experience of conflict between two of my friends to see how we can apply interpersonal communication to solve it.

This is an example which happened during my high school life. A and B are close friends, and it seems that there has never any conflicts between two these people. However, it does happen.

A is the treasurer of a committee in my high school. Of course, he has to keep the funds to spend for this committee’s activities. In that day, because A need to go out so he don’t want to keep this money. Watching B is playing basketball around, A asks B whether A can leave the money to B without knowing that B is so immersed in playing that B don’t notice A’s request. And thing happens: A leaves the money right next to B’s bag. Both the money and the bag are on a blank bench and because there aren’t so many people around, A are confident that no one can steal this money. When B takes his bag to go home, B don’t know this money is A’s.

After the money is stolen, there has been a conflict between A and B. It seems that both A and B want to blame each other because they feel that they are both innocent. A has his own excuse, arguing that A has already asked B to keep the money, so it should be B’s fault to leave the money stolen. But B insists that B haven’t heard of A’s request.

Though the money is not too much, it seems that this accident makes A and B not as close as in the past. So, what do you think A and B should do to resolve such conflict ?

Interpersonal and intercultural communication

In a world of increasing economic, social and cultural interaction, issues of communication are inevitably becoming essential. In the first post, we have talked about the role of communication in our lives. The fact is that although we communicate with each other on a daily basis, not everyone can do it effectively. In such situation, interpersonal and intercultural communication skills will really help us improve our interaction to a higher level.

Basically, interpersonal communication refers to the interaction in which people are able to share ideas with each other implicitly through shared history or body language. Obviously, such communication is indeed crucial in our globalised world now, when we can easily interact with whom we already knew before. For example, in some work environment, colleagues often create some signals that only people involved can understand, in order to for everyone to communicate faster and easier. However, this kind of communication, at some level, is also the main reason for conflicts if the people we are communicating with don’t understand us well. My own experience about my first day coming to the Hall where I live now can perfectly describe such difficulty: my block-mates who have already lived together sometimes talk about stories that made me confused. Gradually, I have known more and more about such stories and integrated more with my friends.

Intercultural communication is, in some way, similar to interpersonal communication. However, it is different in the way that people are able to communicate with others from differing cultural backgrounds. Communication is not just verbal, it is also non-verbal which includes body language, gesture, etc. Sometimes, conflicts happen because we are unconscious of highly contextual elements that are imperceptibly attached to our story. That is the reason why we can make a misunderstanding when interacting with people from other culture. As a whole, only through gaining comprehensive knowledge about cultures are we able to bring communication to a deeper level.

Personally, the module CG1413 I’m taking is really a good chance for me to improve both interpersonal and intercultural communication. Being a member of a group from different cultures, I am strongly convicted that through experience of group meetings or talking, my communication skills will be greatly better.

Reflection on principles of communication and teamwork

Nowadays, effective communication and teamwork skills are increasingly recognized as main factor contributing to job success. Let’s see how these skills are about and why they play such an important role.

Communication basically is a process of conveying information from one to another. At every stage of the communication process, there is a chance of confusion or interference that can disrupt the interaction. Our goal, therefore, is to remove all such barriers. First, the message needs to be clear, concise and concrete. After this step, encoding, the process of conveying the message effectively is also of great importance, due to some potential of confusion. Decoding, the process of understanding the message correctly, faces the same difficulty; in such circumstances, social knowledge can be the key solution. Another factor of communication is feedback from receiver, which is also very useful because it improves the sender’s ability to convey the message. Last but not least, the channel through which the message is transmitted is definitely crucial because it is very common that people often choose wrong channels. The reason is that each channel has different strengths and weaknesses, so we need to choose carefully the appropriate channel for each kind of message.

In the context of a globalized-and-interdependent world, being a perfect individual is not desired as much as being involved in a perfect teamwork. However, there are many factors required for a team to work effectively, including good leadership, effective communication, conflict resolution, empowerment. As the whole, operating a team is much harder than operating a group because it requires each member supplementing others to accomplish the final target. Especially, in today‘s fast-paced and industrialized world, teamwork has emerged as a requirement for business success.

With the advent of globalisation, people from every country will converge to work together. As a global student, I feel that such these skills are really indispensable in improving my career prospect afterwards.