Week 6 – CST – 300 Module 6

OLI – Module 8 and 9

The OLI for this week dealt with active listening and creating an assertion message.

Module 8 was about active listening. When dealing with conflict, you must understand the other person’s viewpoint. To do this, you need to actively listen when they speak. Things that help active listening are looking at the person, letting them finish their thoughts, summarizing what you heard, and ignoring distractions. On the other side, things you should not do while listening are interrupt, talk about yourself, multitask, and finish their sentences.

Module 9 was about creating an assertion message. An assertion message is a response you formulate to raise a problem after you have actively listened to the other person. Your assertion message must include three features an objective description, an emotional response, and an explanation of the problem’s impact. An objective description is a specific example of the problem or behavior. Instead of saying “you are always late,” you can say “when you were late 5 minutes yesterday.” An emotional response is your expression of how the problem made you feel. You can say “I was disappointed…” or “I get upset…” Lastly, you must share the explanation of the problem’s impact on the group. You can say “because the group is now a day behind on work.”

These are critical skills in dealing with conflict resolution. Both skills go hand in hand because you need good active listening skills to generate an effective assertion message to resolve a conflict.

 

Part 1: Help Your Teammates to Develop Capstone Ideas

I had a brief discussion with my group via chat about capstone ideas. I shared that I would like to create a video streaming app. Because it is not an original idea, I would have to come up with unique features to add and make it stand out. My teammate shared a website that helps you generate ideas. The website is called Sharpen.design and it pairs up two things to create an idea for a project. The first is a “design” and the second is “for.” There is a “New Challenge” button that keeps on generating random “design” and “for” topics every time you press it. For example, some results I got were “Design a typographic logo for a butcher in Miami” and “Design a web UI kit for a hospital in Portland.”

Although the topics are not specific to software engineering, it is a clever way of generating ideas. Even taking that idea and adding more specific categories would be a great idea for a capstone project as well.

Part 2: Keep Up With Your Learning Journal

Lecture Module 6

This week’s lecture was a guide to effectively start a career. Professor Tao share his 10 characteristics that companies are looking for. Although I agree with all of the characteristics he mentioned, the one that stood out to me the most was flexibility. He mentioned there was a missed opportunity from one of his accountants when he needed someone to present a project to a different government agency. That person said she was an accountant, and she did not do presentations. When situations like this happen, you must be ready to take the lead because it could open up a whole new set of opportunities for you.

The lecture also included links to the career development website where you can learn how to write a cover letter and a resume if you want to apply for an internship or even a full-time job.

For the final presentation project, our team was assigned Genomics which is the study of all of a person’s genes, including interactions of those genes with each other and with the person’s environment. Our group created a google document that has a section for the 8-10 minute video and a section for the 2-5 minute video as well as a section for assigned roles for each member in each video section.

Writing Lab Module 6

The writing lab this week continued with more detail on writing our ethics argument essay. The lesson focused on paraphrasing. When paraphrasing you should consider who is doing the action, what is the sentence about, where does the action take place, when does the action take place, how does the action take place, and why does the action take place. Answer these questions without looking at the original source to generate the idea in your own words. This will ensure that you are effectively paraphrasing and not plagiarizing any of your sources.