Reflective Essay for LCL100

Since I began my learning at the start of the semester in Learning and Communication Behaviour (LCL100) with Craig McIntosh, I have learnt much about research methods and different forms of communication especially digital communication. Throughout the course we completed class work, independent assignments as well group assignments. I will be discussing the useful knowledge that I have taken from this unit and further what I thought were the good points and the bad points of this subject.

Class work

My Tutor and Lecturer Craig McIntosh posed a question to the class at the beginning of the semester.

‘What is knowledge?’

What is it that people actually know and how they know it, if they in fact do know it at all. One I the statements that I recall mentioning was that the sky is blue. I was quickly bombarded with reasons why that were not entirely true. At night you can see the sky is full of stars stretching across an ever expanding black atmosphere. At sun down the sky can have a cornucopia of colours stretching from horizon to horizon; or white, grey and black clouds can screen some or all of the sky at times. I think this exercise was useful in helping the class understand the concept of knowledge and I mean true knowledge. It also made me realise that when I put anything forward as knowledge, there is a need to back up my point/s with explanation and reference to examples.

During this period we learnt all about knowledge and who makes knowledge etc. We were taught the term epistemology or the theory of knowledge and the three steams of questions to unpack knowledge.
• The way knowledge is structured
• Examination of the nature of the dynamics & progress of knowledge
• The uses of knowledge

The different types of knowledge were also explained in the course. These being Tactic knowledge: subjective knowledge that which we hold personally/individually and,
Explicit knowledge: objective knowledge that which sits outside our consciousness and is therefore rational & measurable. Further to this, it was explained that the pursuit has been to transfer tactic knowledge into explicit knowledge. I understood that in order to have desirable transformation, the personal aspect of tactic knowledge must be detached so all that is left is knowledge in a true socio-scientific context.

A piece of information that I found to be interesting was, the statement about how knowledge is constructed by dominant forces. Such as, in times before freedom of speech when the church was the government, the Earth was seen to be the centre of the Universe and this was a well-known “fact”. Nowadays we know this is not true because we have ways of proving it. Back then however, the church knew that God existed because he placed the Earth in the middle of everything. The church was the dominant force they ruled so they were right.

Individual work

I took in a great deal of knowledge throughout the construction of the Globalisation assignment. I found it not only interesting to research and discuss globalisation but believe the topic was useful knowledge to have learnt. I will now be able to take this knowledge and apply it to other aspects of my University degree. Also submitting the essay digitally online was a process which I had not come across before. It is always good to learn new digital processes especially with the way the world is headed.

Another useful aspect was learning about critical thinking and how to critically think.
Critical thinking was explained as:

‘The process of uncovering the essential elements of an argument or a position that someone holds to be true. It requires the student to produce evidence in support of their position but to also be aware that there may be contrary evidence and as such only relative truth’.

I kept this idea in the back of my mind while writing the globalisation essay. I remembered to back up any statement I was making with creditable information. Also I tried to cover all bases when we were asked to explain when and where globalisation began. Meaning that there were differing explanations and theories on globalisations début and I kept in mind to outlined contrary evidence.

This Reflective essay is also proving to be quite practical. It is making me reflect on the unit, this means going back through previous lecture slides and so on which in turn is solidifying the unit’s teachings in my mind.

Group work

In my opinion group work is always more of a challenge than individual work. The reason being there is organisation, allocation and communication with other students so you are not only worrying about yourself. I understand though that this is good practice for the work force aka “the real world” and it is a good skill have in general to be able to work well with others. Our team split the requirements up into sections and each of us then completed a topic and posted in on the ever confusing wiki space. I think maybe our team could have been a bit more active, but we achieved the goal nonetheless and I enjoyed learning about the globalisation of the sex trade.

The wiki was completely confusing and as I understood many others thought so to. I am not sure if the wikis were put in place to make life easier, or just so the class could learn how to use this recently introduced technology. In my opinion though it made the task harder, but maybe this was just because I had signed up for too many accounts and just got tangled up in the digital web. It is all about learning new material though and I am sure this will also be an asset in the future... somehow.

Library learning

Having the lovely library ladies explaining the library website database was extremely valuable. Being shown and talked through the processes of EBSCO host and Google Scholar etc. has already proved to be an asset for me and my learning. They demonstrated how to gain access to otherwise inaccessible articles and journals. This will be of much greater use to the rest of my University life than to just ‘googling it’. I have already used the library database to acquire article for other classes.

To finish up I would like to say thank you to Craig McIntosh for being a great tutor once again and for always having time to look over my plans and essays and listen to my jive. All in all I enjoyed LCL100... Although I am still not sure about those wikis.

Thank you