Communication Skills for Teamwork: Reflective Summary

Social, Legal and Ethical Issues
 
 
Reflective report
This report is going to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the module “Legal methods and Ethical issues”. The aim of this report is to evaluate and describe the research that has been used for the group presentation and the performance of the group during the presentation. Also, another one point that will be presented in this report is the group work and the cooperation among the members of the group. Finally, throughout this report it will be demonstrated the aims of the module, the experience the students had from the module, how they were influenced and affected through this procedure and the knowledge learned and how is going to assist the students in the future.

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The module’s aims include the awareness development of students, but also enhancing students’ knowledge and ability to critically analyze a numerous of social behaviors, ethical dilemmas and legal issues. Furthermore, by the end of the module, students will be able to make rational discussion and critical thinking about ethical issues. All of the above aims will help students to be ready to encounter any difficulties or specific circumstances of their working life in the context of social networks and digital communication. This module is very helpful and necessary for students, in order to gain knowledge on how all the above issues covered are related to their future, personal life and job.
Additionally, students had to explore the knowledge gained through the module and apply it in practice, which means that students had to make their own research in a certain topic, analyze it and then present it. In our group was assigned the topic “Protecting you and your organisation from malicious digital attacks” which was a very interesting topic, including the legislation part. Furthermore, it was a very recent theme of the 21th century, since technology and internet are integral and crucial parts of our lives. Specifically, “malicious digital attacks” is a term of computing, which is any physical or electronic action taken with the intent of acquiring, destroying, modifying, or accessing a user’s data without permission. As has been stated before, the definition of malicious digital attacks is a very general topic and includes a lot of issues, thus we split it into part and each group member made their research on a specific part. My part was to find the companies which had been hacked, the security PR disasters and digital attacks that damaged the trustworthiness and reputation of the companies. The following paragraphs will analyze the research about malicious digital attacks and will describe the process of the research and my own path before the presentation.
My initial search for articles gave me a lot of general and irrelevant information and it seemed very difficult and slightly confusing. Although, when I correctly understood the topic, I found helpful and relevant information, which made it extremely interesting. Additionally, my research was based on articles, so I used the Google Scholar to find information, since BBC news provided me with a variety of knowledge and examples of companies being hacked. In the appendix, you will find some of the sites that I used and two articles of BBC news with some of my comments on them.
These days, the social media, internet and numerous of online organizations come first on people’s preferences for several reasons. The social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, are being used throughout the day by people, as a way of communication, promotion of products, companies and organizations, as a mode of entertainment and the most important are free. Furthermore, another company which has large number of users is Sony, which has online games (FIFA, PRO) and people can be entertained through that site very easy. There are lots of organizations and companies that people are using, but in my research I focused on the most frequently used, such as Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and Sony. All of these companies have something in common, because they are the most popular, they were more easily hacked and more users were affected.
People who use the social media every day have not only advantages, but also several disadvantages. Although Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and Sony are free services, in order to have access to this applications is necessary for a user to provide all personal details, such as name and surname, email address, gender, birth date, phone number, username and password. Additionally in some cases, is necessary to provide credit card and bank account numbers in order to have access to online games like FiFA.
Throughout my research I found that people’s personal details are not safe, because it is very easy for someone to hack a company and steal personal information of the users. Moreover, through my research I found that all of these online services have been hacked more than one time in the last two years, but also hackers have stolen numerous people’s personal details and passwords. In some cases, users lost a significant amount of money from their bank accounts due to online hacking. Therefore, people should be very careful, when they create accounts and also is recommended to change their passwords approximately every ninety days.
As for our group work, according to Levin (2005), face-to-face meetings are necessary for direct and active communication among group members, instead of communicating through emails or Facebook, were people are unable to understand a person’s feelings and mood. For example, in our team students communicated through emails and meetings, as a result were had excellent communication without misunderstandings and conflicts. Furthermore, according to Hargie (2004) “team is a number of interdependent people bound together by a collective aim. An essential feature of a team is that the members co-operate to achieve jointly agreed goals”.
Furthermore, there are several advantages from teamwork. As Levin (2005) mentioned, teamwork is an opportunity for students to learn more efficiently about the concept of a course, in relation to regular learning methods (i.e. lectures, textbooks). Also, they can develop a different way of thinking, adopt common goals and try to achieve them through teamwork, which is one of the most important facilitators in achieving positive, cost-effective outcomes in various organizational settings (Procter & Currie, 2004).
In addition, teamwork can be an enjoyable and useful experience, because from my perspective, teamwork helped me improve my communication and cooperation skills, since I had to work and achieve a common goal with different kind of people. A group can succeed in doing great things which one person cannot do it alone (Levin, 2005). In our case, if we weren’t a team, each one of us alone couldn’t effectively carry out all the duties and responsibilities of the project. According to Levin (2005), respect between the team members is the basic rule for a successful and efficient outcome, so we tried to respect each other by giving the opportunity and possibility to each member of the group member, to share their ideas and express their opinion about the project. This helped our team to better organize and successfully execute our mission, because we implemented the most original and innovating ideas and methods.
Furthermore, the aim of the group work was to create a good and interactive presentation. Through group work, we found a lot of different and interesting resources to cover our topic and we were perfectly prepared for the execution of the presentation. The day of presentation was slightly stressful for our team members, because we had worked very hard and we wanted to succeed. Moreover, in my opinion, the presentation was good and interesting for the audience, who successfully participated in the quiz that our team created. The game included many questions which were presented during the presentation. The audience was broken in two teams and the team who answered more quickly and correctly the questions, won a price. In my point of view, the presentation was very interactive and entertaining for the audience.
The feedback from the audience was really good, specifically for the quiz, because people laughed a lot and there was a very friendly atmosphere. The feedback forms were quite satisfactory, because most of the forms, as seen in the appendix, focus on the interactive quiz, which the audience liked the most. Generally, through people’s comments appears that the presentation was interactive and enjoyable, but also provided the audience with many useful information about the subject. On the other hand, there were some negative comments about the presentation. For example, the fact that the presenters read through their notes made the presentation less interactive and communicative with the audience.
In my overview, this project was a very good and helpful experience for me, due to the excellent teamwork and team spirit. Throughout the preparation, our team had weekly meetings through which all of our group’s members took joint decisions about the tasks and duties of our project. Also, my group was very helpful for me, since they gave me good guidelines and there was an excellent communication and cooperation between us. The day of the presentation, was stressful, but I tried to be more relaxed and managed to properly present my part, because I worked hard and I did not want to disappoint both my team and me. In conclusion, I am very satisfied with myself and my performance before and during the presentation, since I worked hard with our group and I have tried to be as best as I could. Unfortunately, due to my stress and anxiety during the presentation I spoke very quickly and it might create some misunderstandings as to what I was saying.
In conclusion, the semester one was very useful and interesting for the students. The knowledge and the experience gained will helped them in their future career for several reasons. Firstly, students succeed in creating a different way of thinking, in understanding the legal methods and ethical issues and to gather information and details for dissimilar topics. Furthermore, all the presentations were very good and students worked very hard to accomplish that, although there were some more interactive and interesting presentations, compared to others. This module helped students to understand how to analyze a big topic and how to execute a correct research. In this case, the group work was essentially for this project, because the subject was very large and each member of the group worked for a particular part and the results were certainly much better, compared to an individual work.
References list:
Hargie, O. (2004). Communication Skills for Effective Management. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Levin, P. (2005). Successful teamwork for undergraduates and taught postgraduates working on group projects. England: Open University Press.
Procter, S., & Currie, G. (2004). Target-based team working: Groups, work and interdependence in the UK civil service.Human Relations,57(12), 1547-1572.
 
My research (links)
Articles of my research: