Module reviews for AY19/20 Semester 2: I hope I still remember how to do this...

It has literally been a year since my last module review on this blog, barring the internship review I published in January, which was for only one special module.

But I'm back in school now, to finish my Honours degree! Having had such a good time at my internship worksite (you can read all about it at the link above), I was a little sad at the resumption of life as a student, mainly because I feared for my bank balance without the steady stream of income I had gotten used to over the preceding few months.

It's hard to justify buying a jumbo pack of trash bags that your family has totally no use for (I legit did this during my internship because Gobbler visited GIC and sold the trash bags dirt cheap) when your account has very few digits in its total.

Anyway, something happened just before the semester started that sweetened the deal and made me happier to return to the academic life. I covered it here, but in short, a research methods module which was previously a graduation requirement was made optional for those who don't write a thesis. That's great for me, because I hate research and wasn't going to write a thesis.

So I could take modules that were more interesting and appealing to me. Let's review what they were and how they turned out.

NM4238: Software Studies

MCs: 5 - priority for CNM Honours students, excess capacity may be granted to Year 3 CNM majors

Delivery:

Weekly 3-hour seminar, come prepared to discuss weekly assigned readings

Assessment:

One midterm essay and one final essay of roughly 3000 words each, broad topic will be defined but students are free to write anything within those boundaries = 55%
Weekly blog entries reflecting on the assigned readings + class participation = 45%

Lecturer: Associate Professor Lonce Wyse - 6/10

I think A/P Wyse knows his stuff. His fields of expertise are neural nets and artificial intelligence-generated art, and he can talk at length about them. He clearly loves them very much, which is kinda cute to be honest. Unfortunately, he's a real scatterbrain. I'm not sure if he even had a plan for the semester or was just making stuff up week by week. The assignments were quite free-and-easy, which was cool, but what was not cool was that the entire module felt so free-and-easy that it lacked structure and was just chaotic. His classroom management also left a lot to be desired. He aims for an open discussion-style of teaching, but instead lessons are filled with awkward pauses. Given that he's been in NUS like forever, he should know that we're not the most talkative bunch. We are far from those American chatterboxes you see on shows like High School Musical. It's up to our lecturers to manage our reticence and devise clever schemes to engage with us. That's why they're paid the big bucks. But he didn't do this.

Module: 6/10

I absolutely hated the first half of the module. It was full of philosophical mumbo-jumbo about software being a metaphor for the police and justice system, and programmers as being sexually deviant wizards (yes, the Harry Potter kind) who have fetishes for code instead of genitalia. I kid you not. Hand on heart, that's what I took away from the first few weeks of the semester, though I'll admit this is probably a big misunderstanding. The second half of the semester was much better, earning some marks from me and rescuing the module from a failing score. It was about ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence as well as technological arts. At least those made sense to me. I mean, I can imagine why it's bad to let the government know your every movement through tracking your phone, and I can see how an artwork created by a machine learning algorithm is different from one that was created by a human.

NM4239: Digital Propaganda and Public Opinion

MCs: 5 - priority for CNM Honours students, excess capacity may be granted to Year 3 CNM majors

Delivery:

Weekly 3-hour seminar, come prepared to discuss weekly assigned readings

Assessment:

Midterm take-home essay exam, questions are released on a specified date and students are given two days to submit a response = 20%
Propaganda in my life, individual assignment where you reflect on where you personally encounter propaganda, what kinds of propaganda you encounter, and how propaganda affects you = 15%
Leading discussion, pairs of students are assigned one of that week's readings to summarise and lead the class to discuss and engage with critically = 15%
Group project, a qualitative study using the in-depth interview method on how people perceive propaganda = 35%
Class attendance and participation = 15%

Lecturer: Assistant Professor Taberez Neyazi - 7/10

Dr Taberez could deliver his lessons smoothly and with little difficulty, though at times he would get a little too excited over what is clearly his pet topic and ramble on incoherently for longer than the average undergraduate's attention span at 9 o'clock in the morning. Re-read that sentence to get a feel of what I mean. His classroom management can also be improved. Specifically, if he would like students to have a lively discussion, he needs to figure out how to spark such a discussion into life beyond just begging people to say something or threatening to deduct participation marks. Otherwise there's just a lot of silence and shifty sidelong glances, followed by a reluctant throwaway point raised by one of the less apathetic members of the class.

Module: 8/10

The words "despair" and "hopeless" are what I would use to describe my feelings after learning about propaganda from this module. Propaganda is everywhere. It's an unstoppable force, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Basically, it's not a problem that can be fixed. The reason we study it is so that we, as individuals, can try to inoculate ourselves against it as best we can so that we don't end up being that Boomer who forwards "drink disinfectant to cure coronavirus" to 200 people on WhatsApp. I dunno if that's the effect we're supposed to experience after learning about propaganda, and somehow I don't think it is, but that's what it did for me, making my innards roil with confusion and conflict. But don't misunderstand: this module is certainly enlightening as it will open your eyes to the many forms propaganda can take, both online and offline. And that's certainly knowledge worth arming yourself with, especially in this terribly complex world we find ourselves in.

NM4247: Creative Writing in the Marketplace

MCs: 5 - priority for CNM Honours students, excess capacity may be granted to Year 3 CNM majors

Delivery:

Weekly 3-hour seminar, broken down into about 1 hour of lecture and 2 hours of hands-on writing work and peer critique

Assessment:

Two micro-essays of around 500 words each, telling a personal story about a topic that will be given = 5% per micro-essay = 10%
Narrative arcs assignment, watch some videos and break the stories down into their essential components = 5%
Personal essay, telling a personal story of about 1000 words on any topic you want = 5% for a pitch, to be written like an email to an editor in which you try to convince them to publish your story + 20% for the story proper + 5% for three proposed Instagram posts telling the story in more social media-friendly form = 30%
Group project, write a script for a video advertisement = 30%
Class attendance and participation = 25%

Lecturer: Ms Jinny Koh - 8/10

As the published author of a full-length novel, Ms Koh has the right to teach this creative writing class. It's clear that she knows the nuts and bolts of a good story, and she was fairly capable of imparting that knowledge to us students, especially given that teaching isn't her real job and she was taking the class as a side gig. I felt she took the "workshopping" idea, where students were supposed to work on writing tasks in class and then comment on one another's products, a little too seriously at times. I much prefer the style where the instructor themself is the one to walk around the room and give personalised feedback to each individual student as they work on the writing tasks independently, as my NM2220 instructor did. Writing is a solo endeavour and doesn't quite lend itself to group activities, at least in my opinion.

Module: 8/10

I can see the value in having this module. Storytelling is an important part of the public relations toolbox. Indeed, it can be said that the entire act of public relations is telling a story. Certainly, a good story can be a powerful way to bring across a point. Just think of public awareness campaigns that have stuck with you: chances are, you remember them because they told you a story that resonated with you. This module succeeded in conveying the key lessons we need to know about storytelling, such as the structure of a narrative. We also had the chance to apply what we had learned through the video script assignment, which had us write a script for an advertisement promoting a brand or cause. This is a pretty good simulation of what storytelling will be used for in a real company. But a large chunk of time was spent on the personal essay assignment, which essentially got us to write a short story about an incident from our life. The relevance of this portion of the module to the industry wasn't clear enough.

NM4881A: Topics in Media Studies: Social Media

MCs: 5 - priority for CNM Honours students, excess capacity may be granted to Year 3 CNM majors

Delivery:

Weekly 3-hour seminar, read weekly readings for some discussion but lecturer also includes other ad-hoc activities too

Assessment:

Two in-class quizzes = 10% + 15% = 25%
Forum posting, make 3 original posts (students will sign up for the weeks they will post on to avoid bunching) and 2 replies on the LumiNUS discussion forum based on the assigned readings = 20%
Leading discussion, each student group will choose two research articles outside the assigned readings to present and lead a class discussion on = 20%
Social media audit, each student group will pick an organisation to conduct a social media audit on and prepare a slide deck as if to present their findings to the organisation itself = 15%
Final paper and presentation, each student group will write a paper and give a presentation on any topic of their choice that is related to social media = 20%

Lecturer: Dr Kokil Jaidka - 9/10

Dr Jaidka is a newly minted academic. This was the first class she had ever taught as a full-time faculty member. I believe in rewarding effort and attitude, which is why she has received such high marks from me. Her teaching was not perfect. For one, she was disorganised. Assessment components were changing throughout the semester, and even during her weekly lessons, there were times when she seemed to lose her train of thought or not have a clear idea of what she wanted to do or say. But her heart is in the right place, as the cliché goes. Her communication with students was always open and honest. Indeed, one of the reasons why assessment components were changed frequently was because she was responding to student feedback in real time. I think when she was planning the module, she got carried away and went overboard with the amount of work she wanted to assign because she lacked the experience to have a sense of what load students can handle. But full credit to her for remedying the situation mid-course by lightening some of the requirements and being flexible with deadlines. She was also caring towards all her students. When the coronavirus situation started to turn threatening, she promptly and proactively took her lessons online to be delivered through Zoom, weeks before the university mandated it. Decisiveness like this is what will win the war against the pandemic. Her enthusiasm is also admirable and a pleasant change from her jaded senior colleagues. I enjoyed her random emails which showcased a sense of humour that I had previously thought only I possessed.

Module: 8/10

Given how deeply embedded into our everyday life social media is, it's useful to know some of the concepts taught in this module. For example, one of my LinkedIn connections keeps talking about this thing called the "strength of weak ties" when explaining why he accepts connection requests quite freely, but I had no idea what the "strength of weak ties" was until I took this module. Sociologist Mark Granovetter coined the theory, which encapsulates the idea that when you have many weak ties, you can receive more valuable information that is not available to those in your immediate network of close relations. In other words, weak ties act like bridges between ourselves and the outside world. You can think of a weak tie as an acquaintance or an online "friend" you've never met in real life, and a strong tie as someone you know personally. Social media is essentially a giant network connecting users together. Studying the nature of these connections forms the bulk of what social media studies is all about. This isn't a purely academic exercise: useful insights do emerge. For example, research suggests that the tactic of using influencers in marketing is not optimal. It is very rare to see any one individual influence many other people, and in fact 70% of conversations are generated by non-influential users. Many of our decisions are made when influenced by the people we are emotionally close to. So marketing should move away from using influencers, and try to tap on people's personal connections instead. As you can see, there are little nuggets of wisdom scattered throughout this module. In-class hands-on exercises also have students play with tools such as sentiment analysis algorithms and keyword monitoring programmes. These are practical skills which communications practitioners should probably have some experience with, especially those who are working in social media marketing jobs in the future. Why didn't this module get more marks from me? I felt there were too many assessment components. Removing one and redistributing its weightage among the others would restore balance. I would suggest scrapping the final group paper and presentation, then allocating 5% more to the social media audit to make it worth 20%, 10% more to the leading discussion component to bring it up to 30%, and 5% more to the first quiz to make both equivalent to 15% for a total of 30%.

This semester hasn't been a highlight of my university life, but it wasn't bad either. Amid the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, I'd say that all things considered, this semester went as decently as could reasonably be expected: just average, not outstanding for the right or wrong reasons. In the end, I utilised 5 out of the 10 modular credits of the special Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory allowance given by the university to cushion students against the psychological impact of the pandemic, by erasing the A- grade I got for NM4881A. As all my other module grades for the semester were either A's or A+'s, my cumulative average point inched up by 0.02 and now sits at 4.85, well above my graduation target of 4.00 upon 5 for an Honours with Distinction.

And there goes my second-last set of module reviews ever! Next semester will be my final one before I venture into the working world for good, which means the next set of module reviews, which should be up on this blog in the new year, will also be the last of their kind.