Reflection on the Learning & Oral Presentation

It’s been a colorful journey in ES2007S class for the past four months. It was a course about professional communication and yet I learn more about myself throughout the process, an eye-opener self-discovery.  

There is this classification of learning styles that comprises of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (VAK), developed by Neil Fleming. I believe that at some point of our lives, most of us have encountered this concept and have ourselves tested to recognize our learning styles. By adopting the methods that are coherent to our sensory prowess, we can capture information more effortlessly and naturally, making learning process more effective and efficient. So I did my paper test in VAK around six years ago and had myself in auditory-visual category. The problem with questionnaire test was that the questions tends to be obvious, and so I answered either based on the way I was educated (most schools emphasize on auditory-visual teaching), or the way I wanted the result to be (no one wants kinesthetic, it is too tiring to keep moving while studying).  However, through activities and tasks in ES2007S module, I rediscovered my true position, and probably will change the way I do things in the future.

A particular assignment in ES2007S really changed the way I thought about myself: oral presentation.  It is an intensive multi-tasking that requires deep concentration in all sensory and motoric parts in the body. During oral presentation, we continuously extract information and words from memory as we speak, we observe the audience and capture the situation to give proper responds, and our facial expressions and gestures have to be coherent with the words and the context we communicate.

The conventional methods that I used for presentation consist of making an outline, memorizing the keywords (or sometimes scripts for really strict and important occasions), and finally practice speaking to myself or to my teammates. Nevertheless, every practice I would use different sentences, forget some parts, and sometimes loss the flow altogether. I realized something was amiss. Either I was born a bad communicator or I had been using unsuitable methods. I chose to believe the later. I looked back at the learning types and set them in the context of oral presentation. After all, the oral presentation also requires retaining and recalling information, knowledge, and experience. I found that the reasons I couldn’t performed optimally using conventional methods was because I am a visual-kinesthetic type, not audio-visual as I had believed.  

Basically, several things might happen when I am presenting: 1) my brain capture is more receptive to visual information than auditory memory, I capture audience’s gesture and my brain involuntarily use most of its capacity to process it, I got distracted and can no longer listen to myself nor recall the words out of my mind, and so I stutter; 2) looking at the slides and charts gains me more fluency in speaking, with the setbacks of losing engagement and connection with the audience; 3) hand and body gestures move spontaneously preceding the words coming from my mouth. Sometimes they help me focus in that moment, but sometimes they also overwhelm my speech that they might distract the audience.

Since the last oral presentation about the group proposal, I have been trying various methods to improve the level of fluency and confidence in presenting.  The one that work best for me is the concept introduced by Joshua Foer from TED (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6PoUg7jXsA). The idea is to make the presentation outline more visual. Therefore, what I am extracting from memory during presentation are pictures, moving imaginations, not words and sounds. I tried this during my TR3001: Product Development presentation last week. When explaining the components of the product: pottery wheel generator, I really pictured the electricity running from one element to the other. As the result I felt more relax, eloquent, and engaging while presenting. There is still much work to perfect my techniques. There is tendency to revert back to the old ways. I need more practices to be creative and bizarre for the mental images to work better, but I know I am now in the right path.

Intercultural Communication

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do”. This proverb is probably the most basic advice anyone can get about social and cultural integration. Its conciseness and profound wisdom have confounded me for quite a while. The form of cultural adaptation that the proverb suggests is advantageous in many ways: it avoids misunderstandings, builds good first impressions, helps to find common grounds faster, and therefore promotes effective communication.  The question that I have been asking myself is: what would be the other ‘Romans’ and how to know what do they do?

These questions led me to the idea of cultural behaviours classification. While stereotyping has been shunned by society for various political reasons, for me it remains neutral as how Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize, sees it too. If we can have a classification tree like the taxonomy, maybe it will change the way that we see cultural diversity. Finding common backgrounds will be easier, diversity will be more appreciated, and preserving tradition will be more meaningful. It is always interesting how a premature idea like this will develop.

We need starting points in classification, just like how taxonomy starts with six kingdoms (animalia, plantae, fungi, etc). These starting points must not be too general but able to classify the majority of the people. The first attempt started few years back when I was still in Jakarta, Indonesia. Indonesia is a country where the constitutions require a citizen to have a belief so I thought it would make sense to group people based on the constitutionalized religions: Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist, and Christians. This classification was very appealing in many ways, partly because the nature of religion that already set the majority of personal values, norms, and traditions for its followers. In other words, by having some knowledge about the four main religions and knowing what religion a person holds, I could take a solid guess the what the person eats or cannot eat, the day and time suitable for meetings, how to greet the person, and many other expected behaviours. It all went well until I arrived in Singapore in 2008. The revelations came to me that it is not uncommon that a person doesn’t hold a religion, and that the same religion may have various denominations. But the main reason that the classification is a bit impractical is that religion is not something I can see on a person face.  It is also personal. Some might be offended by being asked about their religion. Therefore, it was probably not the best idea to start the classification with religion.

I would really like to share the idea of cultural classification based on racial diversity, the interesting advantages it has, and the problems in faces at the bottom of the tree. However, I am well aware that I have passed the word limit so I have to end this post here. If you have various useful methods for intercultural classification and communication please do share with me.