Reflexive Summary
As a part time student, I found the whole blog experience very beneficial in this module and I am looking forward to make use of the blogs ideas and experience in my design module next term. I have never tried to blog before, so I liked how we got introduced to an interesting way of communicating and exchanging thoughts. It might become our way forward in our future careers to disseminate our knowledge and communicate complicated concepts. While I cannot given an impartial opinion about my contribution, I can say that reading my class mates’ blogs was definitely enlightening.
First, the lectures topics were diverse and have introduced us to many interesting ideas. One of great functions of the lectures is introducing us to how urban design connects to a diverse range of disciplines and how it impacts many aspects of our life. For example, the history of city designing, the environment aspect, health and mental health, transport, sustainability, and much more important topics related to our urban space. That’s why it was a great idea to be introduced and taught by so many experts in the field with different disciplinary focus. I enjoyed every lecture giving the fact that each and every one interrogated the theme of urban design from a different perspective.
Second, after understanding those ideas, we were given the task of doing some independent research about the topics of our choice for the blogs. At the beginning I didn’t know what to write about in my blogs but then after attending a few of the lectures, I started to have a better idea of the topics that I am really interested in researching further and expressing my thoughts on them. Despite being tricky at the beginning given that I have not done such an exercise before, I found the blog writing part of the module very helpful in terms of developing my academic writing and research skills. Also, in terms of improving my ability to communicate my ideas and reflections in a coherent and concise manner. The instructions and the comments that we received from the teaching team aided my learning and clarified many difficult issues. On the top of all of the above, sharing those ideas with my classmates and making them public online, created a great opportunity to have different point of views from those who have rich and diverse backgrounds. It would be ideal if I had the time to blog more, just like keeping record of everything we learnt even in other modules but the time was limited. I tried to organise my time as much as I can during the term but l learnt that I need to prepare more in the future and always read more.
Finally, I found the website itself of a great help to my learning experience as we have access to the previous blogs from the years before, which allowed us to look at some of the exemplary blogs and learn from them.
After all, the whole module has added so much value to my educational journey.
