Spencer Lee

The last entry in this blog will be a reflection on what I have learned over the course of this term. It will look at what I feel I accomplished and learned as well as talking about what areas I feel I am still weak in and goals for the future.

The Good

I have always felt that my writing ability is one of my greatest strengths. At my various jobs my writing skills have always been something I have been praised for and I was frequently asked to write documents. This writing has generally been less technical or formal than the assignments for this course so it was interesting adapting to the different voice required for the course. Because of this I found the reflection blogs easier than the other assignments because they tend to have a less formal voice.

One of the main skills I feel I have gained this term is how to write for a specific audience that may not be familiar with the subject I am writing about. Most of my writing experience comes from writing research papers for psychology classes where the professor and TAs are well versed in the subject matter. I found it somewhat difficult at first to write with a naive audience in mind but I found it easier as the term went on.

I feel that the formal report I wrote was a very good learning experience since I had never written a formal report before and it was nice to learn the skills required to write one in a school setting rather than having to write my first report for work without any previous experience. I am happy to say that I submitted my report to the COO and project manager at Skunkwerks Kinetic and they used it to inform their decision regarding whether they should change communication and task management tools. After reading the report they agreed with my recommendations and the company will be changing tools by the end of December.

The Less Good

Although I feel I have learned a lot during the course there are still some things I need to work on. The main weakness I still need to work on is not using unnecessary words in my writing and keeping things concise. I feel like I have improved on this from the beginning of the term but it is something I still notice when reviewing my writing, particularly on longer documents.

Another weakness is spotting small grammar and spelling mistakes in my writing. Almost every peer review of my work found mistakes I should have caught myself before submitting the assignment. I think this stems primarily from not leaving myself enough editing time between finishing writing the assignment and the deadline. In the past I have found that editing a document the day after writing it is far more effective than editing it immediately after I finish writing it. Unfortunately I found that the writing of my assignments was somewhat rushed due to the large number of projects and assignments required by my other courses. Having never taken an online course before I found it difficult to keep track of when I should start writing an assignment when group members for other classes were trying to arrange meetings.

The Future

I have recently become more involved in editing documents at work so I hope to continue to hone my skills while working on these documents. I would like to be in a position in which I am able to help with the initial writing of these documents but most of my time in the office is dedicated to programming and most of the time I have to edit is when I am at home. Whether I am writing documentation or emails I know that the lessons learned from this course will prove to be valuable in my career. I believe that strong technical writing skills will help me eventually achieve my goal of becoming a project manager at a tech company.

The final assignment in English 301 was to create a web folio. I have limited experience creating web pages that will ever be seen by another human and the experience I do have almost always involved a much more creative person hovering behind me telling me what everything should look like. In my own projects I generally prefer to work on server-side applications and get by using basic templates for any user interface they require for testing. I found it interesting to have to approach this assignment from another direction.

Content

This was the easiest part of the web folio for me to complete since there was no real visual component to it and all of the content was already created. I went over the assignments I decided to post and made some edits to the spelling and grammar. I also reviewed the peer reviews of the assignments I posted and made sure the assignments reflected the suggested edits. For social media I decided to include my LinkedIn profile as required in the assignment description and my Github profile as it showcases the projects I have worked on and am currently working on. I decided not to include other social media such as Twitter because I feel that those profiles do not add anything particularly interesting to my folio.

Design

I have worked closely with the creative director at Skunkwerks Kinetic Industries over the past year implementing the user interface for the game we are creating so most of my design decisions can be traced back to his style. This primarily led to a minimalist approach that values clear delivery of content over nice visuals or fancy formatting. After investigating some alternative themes I decided to stay with the theme I chose for this site at the beginning of the term as it has a very clear layout and I find it very easy to navigate.

Visuals

This was the hardest part of the web folio for me. In past projects I find I often get carried away with the visuals on a page to a point where it is difficult to navigate or view the content which is exactly what I did not want to do for this assignment. I decided to only use a header image, an imge of myself on the biography page and the Skunkwerks Kinetic Industries logo on the home page. Although other images might be nice I feel that they do not add that much to the other pages.

Final Thoughts

In the end I found this assignment to be quite enjoyable. It was nice to go back and review my work from the different units of the term and see my improvement and what I need to work on. In the future I know I will end up creating a professional portfolio once I have more work to showcase and I think this web folio helped me figure out quite a few things about creating an online portfolio.

This unit primarily focused on writing the first draft of my formal report and peer reviewing one of my team member’s draft. I found the process of writing the report to be fairly straightforward as I had completed the proposal and outline assignments in unit two which provided me with a strong foundation upon which I could structure my report.

My Report Draft
I found that the research for my formal report was fairly easy to perform as it involved surveys and interviews with people I work with so I was able to talk with them in person and remind them about the surveys. This resulted in nine out of thirteen possible survey responses. Since SKI is a small company I was easily able to secure interview with the project manager, Kevin Brown, and COO, Craig Martin. For this report the analysis was very straightforward and the sample size was small so visual interpretation and summary statistics were all that was required. Organizing my report was quite easy since I had created a basic organization for the report in my outline and was able to follow it quite closely. The content of the report draft was relatively painless since I have a well defined argument that is easily split into sections. Although writing the draft took quite some time I found it to be a very educational process since I have never written a formal report before.

My Peer Review
Unfortunately Austin Lee was unable to complete his report draft before the due date. I reviewed the draft he posted on the group forum, which was mostly complete but only missing the conclusion section. His report was well written and I was able to learn quite a bit in reviewing his writing. I have found the review process to be very helpful as it has exposed me to other writing styles and has helped me identify and fix some problems in my own writing. I have also found the peer review assignments to be helpful because lately I have been getting more involved in editing administrative documents and applications and work and the experience editing the writing of my team mates has helped improve my overall editing skills as well.

The process of writing my report draft took some time but I found it to be well spent. I learned quite a bit about how to structure a formal report and how to make the content professional and follow a you-attitude.

The assignments in unit two included: writing a formal report proposal, outline and progress report, creating a LinkedIn profile and researching bes practices as well as peer reviewing a classmate’s proposal and LinkedIn profile.

Formal Report Proposal and Progress Report
Having never written a formal report before I found these assignments helpful in creating a structure to later be used when I write the drafts of my report. I did not have much trouble coming up with a concept for my report since we have been discussing changing communication and task management tools at Skunkwerks Kinetic Industries for a month and I have already done some research regarding the topic. I found that writing the proposal for my report was easier than I expected it to be since the topic allowed me to closely follow the sections outlined in the textbook for a formal report proposal. Writing my outline was fairly straightforward since the structure of my research and report will be fairly straightforward and I have experience writing research based papers from my psychology degree. The schedule for my report was harder to come up with since much of my research was based on survey responses and interviews. I decided to distribute the surveys as soon as they were approved and collect them as late as possible to hopefully increase the number of responses. I feel that although I scheduled interviews for a specific day they are more likely to occur whenever myself and my project manager and the COO of the company have any free time at work. Overall I feel that the proposal and outline assignments were very helpful in cementing my ideas and structure for the formal report but I did not find the progress report to be particularly useful.

LinkedIn Profile
Prior to the assignment I had already created a LinkedIn profile but had not put much work into it. This assignment provided a good opportunity to sit down and spend some time working on updating my profile with current information and making it more presentable. I found that although some of the best practices I found while researching were helpful, such as the knowledge that anyone can give you an endorsement for anything so it is important to keep an eye on that section for random endorsements, many of the recommendations were simply common sense.

Peer Reviews
I have enjoyed peer reviewing my classmate’s work as it gives me an opportunity to learn from how others are writing their assignments as well as to learn more about my team mate’s interests and experiences. I have found the peer reviews of my own work to be informative and helpful both in recommendations on my content and organization as well as small spelling and grammar errors that I missed in my own editing. In his review of my formal report proposal Austin Lee made some very good comments on my content including suggesting I emphasize the ineffectiveness of SKI’s current system for tracking bugs in my report, which I intend to do.

This unit involved a lot of work but I feel like it created a good basis for me to write a well thought out report and it gave me to opportunity to work on my LinkedIn profile, which I had been meaning to do for quite some time.

My peer review of Paul Lee’s formal report proposal
SpencerLee-EditedReportProposal

Writing these definitions was a new experience for me. I have never had to define the term computational complexity in more detail than what was included in my sentence definition. I found it somewhat challenging to convey the information I wanted to in my expanded definition without having to refer to other terms and concepts that a reader with limited knowledge of algorithm analysis would not be familiar with. In writing these definitions I learned several techniques for explaining a term to a naive user without losing the meaning of the term.

The peer review I received for my work was well written and I found all of the points made by my reviewer to be accurate and helpful. I was somewhat unsure whether or not I had presented my expanded definition clearly enough as this is a term that often confuses computer science students when they first learn about it. I was happy that my reviewer was able to understand my definition and only had a few minor comments on terminology and the ordering of my sections along with a few missed typos.

This exercise reinforced my beliefs that good peer-review can help find errors or problems in a piece of writing that the original author did not notice. I was pleased at the level of detail my reviewer went in to. After implementing the changes suggested I feel that my definitions are stronger than they were originally.

Paul Lee’s peer review of my definitions
My edited definitions