Reflective Summary
Reflective Summary
Meaningful journey
Blogging was a meaningful experience to me. As a student studying architecture, it brought a great deal of opportunities for me to absorb knowledge about urban issues, design, planning and strategies associated with current issues. The activity of blog writing is a good chance that I can share information I found with other collegues who have different background knowledge and experiences. Moreover, I tried to write informal blog compared with essay so that viewers could access it more flexibly and casually and it also made it easier for me to enlighten my interest in figuring out new things in terms of architectural and urban aspects.
I really appreciate my tutors, lecturers and collegues although I have not fully focused on this class because of my studio project. The contents I was taught dealt with very interesting and essential topics, which broadened my perspectives. Child-friendly urban design issue is even my key thesis in my design project and I am going to develop this key strategy to solve this problem.
This self-learning curriculum, blogging, allows me to interact and collaborate with one another by by self-publishing, sharing and participating culture in virtual platforms even though it was really demanding. I found this self-learning process is not productive at times since I postponed to post my chapter on time, missing the chance the discussion with others. Nontheless, there is no doubt that blogging provide tons of benefits to my knowledge which I can relfect it to other projects.
Group experience
At the beginning of this semester, I was grouped and in charge of making schedule for the post. My group members and I made a schedule for blog posting considering academic schedule. We tried to give freedom to bloggers in choosing topics so that bloggers can actively participate in this module. However, the topics of lectures were limited so some students might not choose what they really want to delve into. Scheduling seems to be easy but it was a helpful practice to hear everyone’s opinions in the beginning.
Challenges
The themes I chose were smart cities and Design Codes, and I struggled with narrowing down the knowledge that I wanted to convey. I had only experienced writing essay citing articles but I broadened the boundaries of research toward individual blogs or website information in order to gain wider understanding of themes. This process enabled me to improve my research skills. Looking over previous blogs in the last year was also helpful as it was difficult to make bullet points and organise contents such as selecting images, putting contents and paragraphs on the screen in order to make it look better. In addition, blog is a flexible environment to stimulate spontaneous collaboration of user and their participation in online communities but the expectation of this module is less likely to be fulfilled compared to face-to-face environments. I am actually not very involved in open question many times. Nevertheless, I was able to understand how to attract readers to my blog and achieve cooperation for enriching my learning methods via commenting and blogging process.
Even though this module is my last one in urban design, I want to continuously develop my writing and communication skills in online settings. The skills that I learned such as readible writing, attractive contents and critical thinking will be my first step to conducting research and it is beneficial for me to understand what I really want to dig into for my architectural journey. Finally, my interest to urban design has become stronger and I realised the importance of well-planned urban scheme for the quality of environments. I am going to collect a series of topics by blogging indivudal contents for further urban research.
