Reflective Journal #3

Reflect on the student presentations given so far. What has been the most interesting about them?

After listening to almost three weeks of presentations of different topics covered in the CDE course, I had benefited a lot and what most enriching is that I was able to see things in different perspectives provided by different presenters. Some of the presenters’ answers were simply off, but in the other hand, some presenters provided their excellent point of view on the pertinent issues. In general, the presentations by our classmates are satisfactory.

I realized the fact that we can actually learn from each and every student presenter. Each presenter have their own strengths and weaknesses and thus we should learn from their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. In my opinion, eye contact with the audience is the utmost important when it comes to presentations. On the other hand, I felt that the speed of presenting is also very important. Take myself as an example, during the presentation, my speed of presenting is really fast and after the presentation, some of my friends gave me their honest feedback saying that they couldn’t digest what i said. I then realized the importance of tones and speed of presentation and I will certainly take note of that in my presentations in the future.

During the presentations themselves, I managed to discover that each presenter have their own distinct style and approaches. At the same time, I was surprised to find out the fact that in oral presentations, it is a must for us to give really precise opinions and there is absolutely no way for us to get away with some copying and pasting from the Internet. The above is very likely caused by the fact that the audience is only listening and there is no visual aids to help apprehending the content the presenter’s was trying to present.

Besides that, I found some of the presenters’ speech particularly interesting and they are for instance Ming Kit, Gee Yang and Xin Ling.

Let’s start off with Ming Kit. Ming Kit was presenting on the differences between the East and the West and I believed most of our classmates including myself were impressed by his confidence during the presentation and his well-paced speech. He answered the question from multi-perspective and they were relatively strong points that we couldn’t miss which included the technological, religious, values and education aspects. His points were well developed and his impressive presentations skills made them even easier to understand. What even more marvelous was that he also touched on the recent changes of all these similarities and differences caused by different factors.

Up next will be Xin Ling’s speech. He was presenting the exactly same question as Ming Kit. Generally, he was focusing on the ideas of individualists and collectivists ideas between the east and the west. However, there was a major problem in his speech. He totally missed out the fact that the Chinese had changed due to globalization. He mentioned that Chinese are collectivists society and harmony and unity plays a main role in eastern competitions but it was absolutely contradicting to the issue the chinese government is trying to tackle ! The chinese government is now trying to let the chinese society adopt the Confucius ideology and hoping that they would have a harmonious society which we covered in Tutorial 2.

Last but not least, Gee Yang’s speech. He was doing the exactly same topic as me, “The factors that can account for the differences and similarities between the East and the West”. To be honest, this is a fairly hard topic as internet resources barely touch on this aspect. To our disappointment, Gee Yang’s speech was driven towards the differences and similarities and not the factors that account for them. From his failure of answering the question, I realised how important is interpreting a question and if we managed to interpret them correctly, there is definitely a high chance that we will not be presenting irrelevant ideas.

All in all, the presentations are all very insightful no matter they are good or not so fine. Just like what I mentioned, we should always learn from the strengths and avoid the mistakes made by our fellow classmates.

Reflective Journal (II)

After exchanging views with our fellow classmates during CDE classes, I admire Google's style of handling their workers and the management style. Back when the time Google was up on the stock market, people complained that the base price of a unit of share is far too expensive (USD 100+) and now, people started to realise that the price is indeed very reasonable because of the creativity Google have and at the same time, the unique ways they adopt to counter issues.

We had an captivating discussion on why Google is so attractive towards workers. As expected, most of us mentioned about the free massage, free sport facilities and the awesome canteens with free food. However, there are also some of us that mentioned that the stretchable working hours is even more attractive. Besides that, Google also gives their employer 20% of their time to work on their own ideas and projects. I found all of them equally interesting, however to let them be effective towards productivity, the employee definitely need to have integrity. Without integrity, all of this will just become an excuse for the employees to slack.

At the same time, we also discussed whether Google or Apple will be more accepted in China. Most of our classmates mentioned that Chinese prefer to work in an environment which specific instructions are given and not much creativity will be required. Thus, companies that gives much freedom and requires alot of creativity will certainly not work in China and instead, companies like Apple which have a powerful CEO (in this case, Steve Jobs) to give every command in details will then be accepted in China.

Despite the fact that Chinese prefer to work in en environment that is dull and boring, I believe that it’s because they do not uphold interest in their own work. If someone finds his work interesting, I believe he will get the job done whole-heartedly.


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I believe confucianism plays a major rule in the current China due to the dramatic increasing amount of social problems China have at the moment. China leaders also realized that by educating the newer generations of Chinese citizen with the idea of confucianism will probably bring down the amount of social problems. Currently, the Chinese in China is not bonded and all of them are looking into personal gains which are selfish and not improving together as a whole.

Confucianism will certainly help by bringing the chinese citizen together as it encourages harmony, integrity and respect. By using confucianism as a moral-foundation for all chinese citizen, they will understand each other better and improve as a whole and it can probably decrease the rich-poor gap in China.

China’s economic prosperity over the past 2 decades had caused Chinese to forget the good values they had before and all they want is money, money and more money. We can also see this from the fact that corruption in China now is more significant than the past. By preaching the new generation of Chinese the confucianism ideology, they will change and bring back the moral that Chinese had long lost since the economic boom.

Therefore, I can conclude that Confucianism certainly plays a major role in China as the basic moral ideas are what chinese citizens are lacking. However, whether or not this idealogy will be planted on the newer generations still remains a myth.