Communicating in the Information Age
A-
AY23/24 S2
This course is not as waste time as I thought, and I think your experience with it would depend on your tutor. To sum it up, this course is about how to talk and argue with people.
Breaking it down, first we have Critical Thinking. Critical Thinking is like the ability to think about things in a logical and rational way. We are taught quite a few different frameworks on how to piece together our arguments. The Toulmin model is a framework for analysing and constructing arguments, consisting of six components: claim, grounds, warrant, backing, qualifier, and rebuttal, which together help to support and justify the argument. The Ennis framework is a model for teaching and assessing critical thinking, emphasising the development of skills such as identifying and clarifying issues, evaluating evidence, reasoning logically, and making well-supported judgments. The Paul and Elder model is a framework for critical thinking that includes elements such as clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance, and fairness, organized into three main components: intellectual standards, elements of reasoning, and intellectual traits to cultivate disciplined, analytical, and fair-minded thinking. I think this was the most important part of the course, as one of the assignments is to make your own critical thinking framework and turn it into a presentation as our CA1. My team and I didn't do so well on this, but I think it's still okay.
The second part of the course is about persuasion. How to take your argument and convince others that what you're saying is true. Feels kinda duh, but it really isn't. The tutor gives lots of exercises for us to try out, all leading up to CA2. For CA2, we are to take an article and do a commentary about it (about 600-850 words). Talk about the implications, and give lots of your own opinions. A word of advice: don't just praise the article entirely. But rather, try being Uncle Roger for once and nitpick on the small details and nuances, as well as the big ones. The topic for my sem was 'Human Agency in AI', and I wrote about Google GraphCast.
The final assignment CA3 is a wildcard assessment. Basically, each person is given a random prompt about technology or other topics and they give a quick 2 minutes presentation about it. You get 5 minutes to prepare, and in that time you can do as much Googling/ChatGPTing as possible. But once the timer is up, try to present without looking at any notes or phone. Try to string the arguments as fluidly as you can, but don't worry about making it perfect. They are looking for structure, content and delivery, so try to hit all three decently well, and not just one or two.
As for workload, my sem was pretty lax with only 3 CAs (as compared to the 5 CAs in previous sems). Tutorials are only three hours, once a week, so that's the best it gets. Easy to plan around a schedule since there are so many slots you can take.
As I've mentioned before, your experience in the course depends heavily on your tutor and how engaging they are. My tutor was quite engaging, so I think I did quite well in the course. I think I deserved the A-, and I'm glad I didn't need to use my SU for this course.