A500.9.4.rb_AlbertoGil

Reflect on your perceived value of this course. Include both positive and negative aspects of your experience. What might you have done to improve your learning experience in this course? How might the University or your instructor provide additional support for your learning? Were there topics covered in this course that seem particularly relevant or irrelevant to your experiences and to what you expect to come in future courses?

           

            There are many values to courses such as the leadership course which I have taken over the past 8 weeks. I think that MSLD 500 is very important considering how many people might not be prepared for the challenge which we are just getting started. There were three main components in my opinion which really make this class important to get through as a pre-requisite to all the other leadership courses. The three components are critical thinking, action research and APA writing. In this class my view was completely changed on the importance of these three components.

            I truly felt that critical thinking opened my eyes to a new way of seeing things throughout life in general. I now know that I need to think things through and I know which route to take to get the true meaning of my studies. This will be important throughout my time as a graduate student, knowing how to think clearly will give me the insight I need to get the most out of my studies.

            Our action research project helped me take on the role of being  a being a leader, for once I was the one doing the research and I was not counting to heavily on the work that others have done. This project gave me a different perspective compared to the work that I had done in the past, it is different when you are the one that is in charge of getting the data. I feel that this project was meant to help us feel and understand what it is like to be a leader and rely on ourselves more than others.

            Overall the most important part of this course for me was the practice I received with APA writing style. I feel that this was something that I was very weak at and I had not experienced too much practice with it in the past. Knowing how to present your work is one of the most important things that a leader can learn to do. As a leader you have to be able to guide your team, if you are not able to present your work in a scholarly way then no one will take you serious. Having the respect and support of your team is essential in our success as leaders, once this is lost it is very hard to get back.

            I think that this course was structured very well and if there was something I could have changed I think that it would have been the time constraints which I and probably most people have to deal with when taking courses like this. I feel that my learning experience would have been a lot better if I had more time to think things through, this is a personal issue which I will have to get around. As far as the class goes, I think we were given more than enough time to complete the work. Trying to find a balance between school work and life is something which I will have to get better at as I continue through this degree program.

            I think that this was a great semester, I can see how this course will create some great leaders. This course and degree is meant to get people to break out of their shell as followers and begin to become leaders over time. I can see how this degree program will be very different from when I was working on my under-graduates degree and I am looking forward to the challenge.

           

               

A500.8.3.RB_Albertogil

                Good presentation design

                                                             

                This week in class I was asked to summarize my current thoughts on good presentation design. I sat back and thought about how I felt about presentations and I did a bit of critical thinking. I thought about in the past what has grabbed my attention, who has been able to teach me something through a presentation, and most important was I remember any presentations I have been to?

            After thinking about this for quite some time I came to the conclusion that I only remember one presentation that I have been to. It was crazy to think that I only remember one presentation that I have been to in the past. I remember when I was in the NAVY the military hired this public speaker to come and talk to the base about becoming anything we want to be in life and completing our goals. I would say that this had to be about seven years ago and I still remembered this person’s presentation. The rest of the presentations I have been to are all lost somewhere in my memory bank.

            Recently I was asked to watch a presentation for class by Hans Rosling, this was such a great presentation and again I actually learned something and I still remember what was discussed. I was so impressed because it had been so long since I had seen or heard a memorable presentation.

            I then asked myself what is so memorable about these presentations that it has stuck to me in such a memorable way? The answer is that these guys were amazing public speakers, they were good at getting the message across and connecting with their audience. Sure they had great slides and great data to go with their presentation but they knew how to talk and engage with their audience on a personal level. The key to their success was the design of interacting with their audience in a memorable way.

            Now of course I cannot give all of the credit to their great communication skills, there were other key concepts which make a huge impact on good presentations. I feel that presenting your data in an organized way is extremely important, helping your audience understand the data and have it come alive is something that I have seen in good presentations. Hans made his data take on what seems like a trip through the past fifty years and give a good representation of it in five minutes. Great visuals and simplicity made this complicated data so easy to understand, this is particularly impressive because Hans makes this data which could have taken months to collect easy for even a child to understand. In this presentation there was no clutter and it was not chaotic at all to understand.

            Thinking about these presentations always leads me back to the same thought that the best type of presentation design might just be the simplest one. The presentation which makes complicated things easy to understand will get the most points in my book. As a society we tend to over complicate things perhaps to impress others but what we must remember is that the main goal to a presentation is to teach others.

             

Quantitative Research

Quantitative Research

There are many elements to quantitative research, quantitative research is very important when we are trying to study society as a whole and turn it into a numerical equation. It sounds like a hard task but through quantitative research we can make sense out of the many different people in this world and all of their behaviors. I think that this type of research is important in a country such as the United States, since we have cultures from all over the world mixed into our American society it is important that we understand ourselves more. If we are to improve as a nation we need to study ourselves and what we can do better so that we can have a country where the majority of people can feel proud of it. Quantitative research can do all of that for us, it can be a lot of work but the results can seriously change many things for the better.

            One of the first things we must do when starting quantitative research is to plan the research which we want to study. Selection of the theme and topic are very important factors, we want to research things that have our personal interest. Having a personal interest in the topic at hand will motivate most researchers and create a stronger bond with the task at hand. Many researchers find that the research they are completing has a social significance, this is also important because many times people are able to help their society with their work and at the same time might be able to find others who are willing to help fund the project. When you are planning your research it is important to reflect on what past work has been done so that you might save yourself some time. Pre-existing data will help you see what others have done in the past and help you see where you want to take your work, you can determine from pre-existing data what you would like to add to the research of the topic at hand.

            So now that we have a plan of the type of research which we want to do we need to have an idea of the research design. This is important so that we can have a logical structure of the research data. It is vital to the research that we can answer the initial question which we are researching and present it as best as possible to get the point across. Doing the research is useless if we cannot get our point across in a clear way. Clearness is one of the standards of critical thinking, if your audience can not see things clearly than no change will come from the research. When working on your research design there are many different methods of data collection. You can collect data though questionnaires, structured interviews, unstructured interview, observation, participation observation, document analysis and obstructive measures. These are all vital components to quantitative research, without these methods of research our design might become too random and will not portray the most accurate information possible.

            Sampling is another element of quantitative research, sampling is when you take a small amount of people who represent a larger population. Sampling is used because when you are studying a larger group of people it is usually not possible to keep track of everyone’s behaviors. With sampling there is a margin of error in place to weed out the discrepancies which might come to be with sampling. This is all taken into account and can be statistically estimated. Usually sampling does work great because in society many different groups of people and cultures have similar behaviors. The similar behavior found amongst different groups or categories of people is what makes sampling an accurate way to conduct quantitative research. When sampling we must take into account representativeness, equivalence of population and sample. If the sampling is done correctly, population and sample should be accurate with the margin error. Also the bigger the sample group the more likely that the sampling portion of the research will be accurate. Accuracy and precision are also a part of critical thinking standards and to achieve the most understanding for our public through quantitative research the data must be as accurate as possible.

            Last but not least, if the quantitative research which has been conducted is to be well respected, an important element is that our ethical principles have not been compromised. When dealing with the people that you conducted your research with there has to be a bond and confidence that you will use the data in the best way possible. No harm can come to the participants, a lot of times people are letting you into their lives when performing research such as quantitative research. There needs to be anonymity so that your participants are protected against future scrutiny, if we are to continue to conduct projects such as this participation will be vital. For these types of studies although at times it is important that you are observing without the knowledge of the participants, we must still remember to get the participants consent. There is a lot that goes into quantitative research but I think that the most important element to this research is that we hold our ethical principles to a higher standard.