Lesson 12 (8 Nov 2011)

Reflections on the Entire Course

Today marks the last lesson of Technology and World Change. Throughout this course, I can say for sure that my understanding of technology and how it changes the world has increased significantly. Given how we are swiftly progressing towards an era where technology will be heavily emphasized, the learning gains from this course would certainly be useful in the near future.


Prior to this course, I have been rather skeptical about our increasing reliance on technology due to the detriments that follows. However, upon further understanding about technology, I feel that the benefits of technology more often than not outweigh the detriments. For instance, some may claim that the use of Facebook in the workplace has led to a loss of productivity, and indeed, statistics have proven so. Close to US$1.14 Billion had been lost. However, allowing the usage of Facebook in the workplace had also been proven to improve the mental well-being of the employees and in doing so, improve their productivity. At the same time, firms who are less strict about the use of social media in the workplace will also be more appealing to job applicants who view this generosity as a form of staff welfare. Ultimately, the benefits that firms stand to gain will be greater than the loss of productivity they may experience.


This course has also given me greater insights about what the term technology encompasses. What I found most interesting was the idea of technology forecasting. It had never occurred to me that technology should be forecasted. Rather, I have all along thought that new innovations should merely arise to meet the needs of the present. Thankfully I am not the owner of any firms else the firm is doomed to failure.


To sum up, this course has been a very enriching experience and in my opinion, has achieved the desired outcome of educating students more about Technology and World Change.

Lesson 11 ( 2 Nov 2011)

Learning Gains from Web Report


Initially, the thought of having to create a web report as a project is daunting to me. I had no prior experience in creating a webpage (with the exception of this blog), and I wasn’t naturally good at computer related stuff. Thank goodness for the SIS students in my group who got the website started, and guided us along the way on how to edit the webpage.


There was much to learn about creating a web report, from inserting a picture, to including the references and so on. It was definitely a good learning experience for me and I believe that these soft skills will come in useful in future.


Creating a web report is very different from the conventional report that I am used to. Firstly, the web report cannot contain too much information to prevent the website from looking overly cluttered. In this sense, we faced difficulties in selecting the appropriate information to be included in the web report from our very comprehensive research. Being accustomed to writing a normal report, we did lots of research, failing to take into account the limited amount of information that can actually be posted. As a result, we had to undertake the tedious task of drastically summarizing our findings. On hindsight, what we should have done was to design and plan the outline of the web report, rather than jumping straight into the research first. This could have saved us a lot of precious time.


Next, to make up for the information that was cut out while summarizing, we thought to include relevant videos since pictures speak a thousand words, much less a video. It also helps to keep the readers engaged and interested in our topic.


A web report must also be visually appealing, and at the same time, promotes interaction between the reader and the administrators of the webpage. Our initial idea of including a forum page to promote discussion about our topic on Ecotechnology eventually had to be scraped because of the limits of the web provider. Instead, we dedicated a section for readers to leave their comments, as well as a section where readers can email us directly if they do not wish to post their comments in public. We also included a direct link to our Facebook page that was created as a platform for further discussion as well. A vast majority of our population actually has a Facebook account, and thus, we felt that Facebook will be a good medium to promote our topic. I think what I can learn from here is that the web is truly very versatile and although it may have its limits at times, there could be better alternatives to explore. Thus, we should be more flexible and open-minded in order to identify these alternatives.


In addition, a web report should also be user-friendly so that it is easy for users to navigate around. Initially, we had tabs for every single component that will be covered in our web report. However, it makes the entire page seem very messy and disorganized. Thus, we had to collapse a few topics with some common elements under one heading. However, there was still a section on stakeholders’ roles which was lacking in clear navigation. Upon suggestions by a member of the class, we decided to add sub tabs for that section to improve the ease of navigation.


All in all, this web report provides a good learning experience for me. Apart from hands on learning from my group’s web report, I have also learnt from the web report that was presented by the other groups. I believe that these learning gains can be put to application for future projects.