Hello,
Today I will be discussing the very first topic of the Ethics & Professional Practice course (CP373 for those interested!) that I’m currently taking at Laurier. The subject that we started off the course with was Values and Conflict.
This module consisted of four in-class activities: “Peer Introduction”, “Values Exercise”, “Conflict Types and Intensity Levels Exercise”, and “Conflict Resolution: 4W Builder”. In my post today, I will briefly describe each of these activities and my role in them, then conclude with my reflections of the topic and the purpose of these activities.
The very first activity involved talking to a partner (student sitting beside you) and asking them three questions while staying completely silent as they answered. We were given a minute to do so then switch roles. Then came the interesting part. Our instructor picked volunteer pairs to come down to the front of the class and asked the person to answer the three questions as if they were their partner. What made this tricky was that the entire class was asked to look at the person whose answers we were hearing, not the speaker who spoke on behalf of their partner.
For the second activity, we were asked to read 20 values and pick 7 that we felt were most important to us. It was interesting that while I had picked a little more than we were asked to (about 11), my partner had only chosen 5 values in the minute we were given. We were asked to write down the common values that both my partner and I shared and found that we had at least 3 values that appeared in both our lists. This was then extended to the entire class and we were to figure out what the 5 most commonly shared values were. I found myself in agreement with the resulting list though I had other values myself that I ranked higher when doing the exercise individually.
The third activity required filling out three tables about the types of conflict and their intensity levels. What I liked about this activity was that it was a lot like taking notes on a new topic but I found myself absorbing the content better since we were asked to record examples rather than the descriptions of each type of conflict and level of intensity. While filling out the third table which combines the types of conflict with intensity levels, we were asked to come up with examples for each. The level of engagement with the students definitely had us thinking harder and applying the theory right away. It was a good way of learning.
The last activity was very interesting. The question posed was, “How would you explain to a man stuck in 1970 what a computer is using ONLY four words?”. This had me stumped for a few seconds as I wondered how could you possibly sum up something so complex in just four words? Where do I begin? The words that I did end up choosing in the minute we were given were: Information, Intelligent, Machine, and Encyclopedia. The fun part, and slightly chaotic, was when the entire class was asked to decide on four words in a minute. In the end, the final list we came up with was: Information, Communication, Connected, Efficient.
Rumsha Rafi CP373 Blog 