Personal Background

 你好! My name is Peihua, you can call me Para. I am a third year undergraduate student in the International Development program. IDS is my major and my two minors are Environmental Study and Economic. I came from South of China, living in a city next to Guangzhou in Guang Dong province. There are mainly two types of language in China, one is Mandarin which spoken by the most of Chinese and the other one is Cantonese which spoken by the Chinese who living in Guangdong province and Hong Kong. There are also two different forms of Chinese character that written by Chinese. The simplified Chinese is mainly used in Mainland of China and original complex Chinese is mainly used in Hong Kong and Macau. Because Guang Dong province is located between the mainland of China and Hong Kong, and we speaks the same type of Chinese language, therefore, most of people in Guang Dong province like me can either speak Cantonese or Mandarin and read Chinese character in simplified form and complex form. I love online shopping, therefore, most of my stuff were bought from different online shopping websites. In China, the most popular shopping website is Taobao. In Hong Kong, the shopping website is slightly different from Taobao, most of the shopping website is formed by specific companies and selling their own products. As I can read different forms of Chinese character, it is easier for me to compare different products in different websites. After my education, I would like to keep working on the job which is relates to online shopping.

Interest in the course

I choose this course because I would like to know more about the relationship between communication and development. Also, I like to know what the characteristic of internet in communication and development. It might be able to help me to have general framework of how does people interacted with the developing communication technology. And I am looking forward how this course can inspires my future career. I am a little bit worried about understanding the technological jargon, it might take me a while to understand and get used to use them. It also makes me very exciting on learning those technological things which is new to me. The other thing that I am worried about is the final paper, as English is not my first language, I might make lots of mistake on writing a paper, and I will visit the writing center frequently to improve my paper.

Vision or Aspiration as an Active Learner

In my opinion, active learners attends every class and tutorial, and do the reading before the class so that we can have more ideas of what does professor going to talk about in the lecture. Also, the benefit on reading in advance can help someone like me to have more time to understand the technological jargon that going to use in the next class. The other advantage of reading ahead is we can come up some questions and ask in the class, or we can relate our experience with the knowledge in the reading and share the ideas in the class. Moreover, an active learner has their own way to figure out the answer. For example, if I want to find out how does ADSL works, the first thing I will do is Google the definition of ADSL. If I still cannot clearly understand I will use different search engines in my own language such as Baidu. And then I might go to library and try to find some articles about ADSL to have deeper understanding of it, and discuss with other classmate who interested in the question. The last method I will use is asking someone who is professional such as professor, TA or computerite. Nevertheless, the most important aspect of been an active learner is actively interactive with other people. As I believe, people can gain lot information through communication with other people than study alone.

In this course, I am hoping that I can learn at least one new skill on using specific software technique, such as I learned different Excel techniques from other environmental studies course. And in this course, the new skill to me is the function of Wiki. I also recently learned how to use the Google Drive to do the group work with other people, it might be not new to other people, but it is good to share the techniques of different software that you know and makes our study more efficient. I think the strength that I have is the reaching technique that I learned from pervious courses, such as searching the data of how many liters of alcoholic beverages consumed by Ontario in different period from official statistic website. And I am very happy to share the technique with anyone who interested in searching data of different aspects.