TWC 12th and final lesson!!

Wow we're already in week 13! The official last week of school. I thought last week of hectic but this week seems to be even more so, with more things due and project presentations and homework!
Time really flies when you're in Uni because every week there's so much to do and each week just passes by so quickly. Our next challenge is to do well in the final papers which i have 5 papers this semester! So I have pretty much to study..

Okay so enough of blabbering, this week is similar to last week's class. The only exception is that I'm presenting this week! My group's topic is on Safety technology in automobiles.
This is our group's website: http://www.wix.com/2011twc/cars

I would like to start off by saying i'm really really proud of my group with a good job on the website. It is really really nice and i'm satisfied with our work.
I'll talk about my experience and the difficulties we faced while doing this project.
First thing every group is supposed to ideally have at least an IS student but due to the small size of our group, there are limited IS students. And so, my group is one of the few without any IS students. This proved to be a challenge because we need to learn how to build a website without anyone teaching us.. and here's the catch.. on top of all the work we need to do. Fortunately, wix.com is pretty easy to learn, credits to it for being quite user-friendly, but nevertheless, it still took my group a significant amount of time trying to figure out how to do this or that. This made me think of a future possible technology of using mind control to build a webpage where you just need to have the idea and your website will be designed out.
Next, one of the difficulties we faced is the choosing of topic. Yes, there are alot of topics to choose from. But when you narrow down to topics which our group at least have some background knowledge on, topics that can be researched and collect much information, and topics that must be interesting not only to us but also our peers are they are, after all, the ones that is going to grade our presentation. We started off with energy and found it too broad as there are many forms of energy and within each form of energy, there are many other technologies. Hence, we decided to narrow down to water technology. We did some research on it and found that it was too vast to cover still. There is too much work to be done and it would be difficult to cover every part of it. Also, the technologies are not really interesting with the usual hydropower or newater. So we decided to change our topic as we believe we should do topics where we can go for quality instead of quantity, which means the topic cannot be too generalized. Hence, after browsing, throwing our many ideas on what topics we can do, we decided to do on Safety technologies. We initially wanted to do air, land and water. But air and water we tried to research on the safety technologies which we found to be quite limited. However for the land side, particular cars, there are many areas we can cover and hence we decided to zoom in and do our group project on Safety Technologies in automobiles.

Although, it had been difficult, I've learn pretty much how to design and create a website although i'm still not a fan of it. Our group presentation went pretty well in my opinion and i'm still really proud of my group. A great job on the website! It's really cool and concise.

Well i'll stop here for my group presentation part and talk a little about my reflection on this TWC module. TWC is second class I've ever attended in SMU. From someone who "doesn't really know much" about technologies(notice the inverted commas), I have grown alot in this past 13weeks. This is a really interesting lesson for me as I learnt many new things and perspective that I never knew or would not pay attention to. One of the reason i really liked this class is because there is not many technical terms used in here, unlike other classes where you're introduced to many many new terms everytime and is expected to learn and understand every single one of them. This less stressful way ultimately allows us to learn more and absorb more. What we learn in this class can be used forever, throughout our lifetime. Other technical classes where we need to memorize, we'll probably forget them the day after our final exams. I think we just can't have the best of everything and it needs to balance out.

Overall, I really enjoyed my journey in this TWC class. Also, one point is that my class is small, with only 20+ people compared to other classes with about 45 people. I really like a small class size as it can make the class more comfortable, more time to share everyone's own perspective and the pace of the class does not have to be very fast. I've always wondered in other classes with 6 presentations compared to our class where we have 2-3 presentation per class, it must be really fast pace.

I've learnt alot in this module and enjoyed myself. I want to extend my sincere thanks to prof for making our class such an interesting one and sharing all his interesting and insightful perspective on everything.
And yes, this is going to be the last post for this blog(unless prof wants to give more bonus marks for more journals :D) hence it is exceptionally long.
I rate this class 10/10 for being such an awesome and interesting one. :)

Till next time ...
Cheers! :)

TWC 11th lesson!!

It's the last second week of the class. This is really a hectic week for me with pretty much of projects deadline coming adding on top of the pile of homework that needs to be done.

Today's lesson is mainly on presentations where 3 groups will talk about their web report.

However, I would like to first talk about an interesting quote shared by Prof at the start of the class.
"Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.”

This means that if you understand something, you’ll be able to put the concept in simple words. If you can’t do it and have to explain in complicated terminologies, it’s highly likely that one does not truly understand it. I have the exact same thoughts when i was in secondary school. I always believe explaining something in technical term is difficult to understand and students may find it hard to grasp. When i really understood something my teacher was teaching back then, if i was about to understand it and my peers don't, i'm able to explain them in simpler terms that is easier to understand. Hence, I believe textbooks should be as simple as possible in order for people to learn easily.

On the group presentation part, generally i think all the websites are really well done, especially the first group that does Technology and the Arts. Their website was really well done, informative and included many pictures as well. We can see considerable effort put into the making of the webpage. Seeing all the groups with their completed websites (well after presentation there were a few more improvements to be made), i realized my group's website is quite far from the norm. I dedicate this to the absence of anybody with prior webpage design knowledge. We have lots to do and improve on for our website and hope we can do a good job next week during our presentation! :)

Overall, this lesson was educational, allowing us to know slightly more in depth to a few topics covered by the different group. However, it was pretty monotonous during some parts of the lessons.. but it was good overall. :)

I rate this class 8/10.

Cheers! :)