Personal Background

Hi everyone, my name is Sylvia, hopefully through the student directory; I will get to know everyone better and vice versa. My parents emigrated from China in the mid 1980’s and worked very hard to save money before settling down in multicultural city of Markham.  My parents raised me to preserve my cultural roots, so at a very young age, I attended Chinese school (probably what many Canadian born Chinese kids dreaded the most). I did not understand why I needed to learn Chinese at the time, considering we live in Canada the official languages are French and English, I felt like I was wasting my time studying something I didn't need. However, after leaving Chinese school, I realized the increasing importance of the Chinese language and can communicate in Cantonese and Mandarin in addition to English. I am currently in my fourth year studying Public Policy and International Development. I am still unsure exactly what career I want following graduation but I want to be proficient in French and use my multilingualism to help those in need.

Interest in this course

To be frank, I am taking this course because it is a pre-requisite for the IDS program. After reading the course description, I knew this course would be different from the previous IDS courses because it would focus on ICT which is something that has not really been tapped into yet. After completing this course, I hope to be able to converse with sophistication about the web, different forms of communication technology and its effects on development. One thing that worries me for this course is the amount of public speaking in the lectures but on the bright side, the class size will be helpful.

Vision and Aspiration as an Active Learner

For the last few years of university, my comfort zone has always been attending lectures, completing readings, and evaluations and leaving the course with nothing more but a grade- probably what one would consider disengaged. However, just this past summer, after taking a seminar course in political science, I realized I do enjoy having something to say in class and that my colleagues are actually more accepting and supportive than I thought.

To be honest, I am not sure what strengths I possess that could benefit the rest of the class. I simply hope that I can be a meaningful team player and present myself with a supportive attitude so that my colleagues whom may share the same problem with public speaking will know that they are not alone! Since my second major is in public policy, my interests lie in the political loopholes and faults of developing nations and neoliberal policies.

I think active learning really pushes the individual to fully engage in the course, opposite to a typical lecture with the professor’s thoughts and opinions, I hope to be exposed to a wider variety of perspectives from fellow colleagues. Each week’s course activities will definitely ensure that I am on top of my readings in order to contribute in class. Since this course is more about ICT, I hope to leave the course being more knowledgeable on copyright and intellectual property and the technicalities behind the popular sources like Wikipedia.

Hopefully, as an active learner of this course, I can to improve on my communication skills- integrate more sophisticated vocabulary in my conversations and organize my thoughts and have a clear idea of what point I'm trying to make. These skills are especially useful in the workplace one day. My perception for an active learner is to play a dual role, as a teacher and a student in an assertive environment where colleagues are accepting and supportive of everyone’s contribution.