Peer assessment #1

Peer assessment for group presentation: week 11, group 2, Puerto Rico

Content and organization
Individually, the first two presenters deserved a good mark as their presenatations were well-researched, logical and provided in-depth information about Puerto Rico, covering a range of topics from music and religion to history and language. But the last presenter was all over the place, and only repeated what the first two said. So overall, it would probably average out as satisfactory – satisfactory 5/8

Audiovisual Media/Other presentation material
Good – like most groups, they used a powerpoint presentation and their slides summarised and illustrated what they were saying quite well. THe only problem was that their slides weren’t timed very well. Only a few sentences accompanied a slide and there was no time for the audience to absorb what was on the slide – good 6/8

Presentation skills
Good vocal skills but quite fast and the presentation had too many statistics in an already overly informative speech, so audience engagement was not very high. Again, the group was let down by the last presenter, whose lack of preparation showed in her lack of confidence and it was really quite painful to watch – satisfactory 4/8

Contributions of members
It didn’t seem so much that two members dominated as the last member didn’t put in the same amount of work, time and preparation as the other two and this really let down the group. It almost seemed like she didn’t even look at her presentation before the date – unsatisfactory 0/3

Week 11: the Americas

The lecture last week proved to be the most helpful of all lectures so far, as it covered the Americas and the US-Mexican border and this week, in Spanish 3, I’m doing a presentation on crossing the border. So it’s a good thing that each topic has a different focus country. Anyway.

Ideas I found interesting:
- State borders are not essential or timeless, they are constantly changing.
- The effects of a border extend beyond the borderlands.
- Latinos are marginal to the imagined community and are considered “outsiders”, yet Latinos were the original inhabitants of much of the US
- Aztlán – a nation that’s neither the US nor Mexico

Mexicans refer to the border as 'La Linea' - the line. And that's all it really is - a line that the US and Mexican governments decided on, despite the fact that it clearly divided communities. Which is another consideration - is the imagined nation stronger than the physical nation?


Just keep on pushing: over the borderline



This was taken on the Mexico side of the border wall between Mexico and the USA, at the beach where the wall extends far enough into the tide so that any attempt to swim around it would be fatal. The barrier itself is actually easily crossed, but border patrol is thick on the USA side.

Image: GuzVenom via deviatnart.com
Text: ~calistardust via deviantart.com

Week 10: War

Sometimes it’s good to look at the bigger picture. In terms of war, though, sometimes we spend too much time thinking about this bigger picture and we forget the smaller picture – that yes, this affects people on a daily basis. So while the lecture didn’t cover the Iraq war, because it’s the most prominent current war in most Australians’ minds, I thought it would be interesting to examine the statistics and look at this aspect of war:

U.S. SPENDING IN IRAQ

• Amount of money spent and approved for war in the US - About $800 billion of US taxpayers' funds spent or approved for spending through mid-2009. In April 2009, President Obama announced that he will seek an additional $76 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• U.S. monthly spending in Iraq - $12 billion in 2008

• U.S. spending per second - $5,000 in 2008

TROOPS IN IRAQ

• Troops in Iraq - Total 140,000, including 135,000 from the US, 4,000 from the UK, and 1,000 from all other nations

• Troop casualties - 4, 594

• US troops with serious mental health problems - 30% of US troops develop serious mental health problems within three to four months of returning home

IRAQI TROOPS, CIVILIANS & OTHERS IN IRAQ

• Journalists killed - 138, 92 by murder, 46 by acts of war (as a journalism student I thought this was interesting)

• Estimated number of Iraqi civilians killed - A UN issued report dated Sept 20, 2006 stating that Iraqi civilian casualties have been significantly under-reported. Casualties are reported at 50,000 to over 100,000, but may be much higher. Some informed estimates place Iraqi civilian casualities at over 600,000.

QUALITY OF LIFE INDICATORS

I created the image below to help me visualise the following statistics in relation to each other, as opposed to just being numbers on a page.



• Iraqi unemployment rate – 27% to 60%, where curfew not in effect

• Percent of professionals who have left Iraq since 2003 - 40%

• Average daily hours Iraqi homes have electricity - 1 to 2 hours

• Iraqis without access to adequate water supplies - 70%

http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm

Week 9: Food and globalization

So basically last week’s lecture was on food security, which is having access to healthy food (not just any food. So if you had access toan endless supply of McDonald’s, but nothing else, then you don’t have food security).
It was something I’d never even considered until about two weeks ago. Food security is something I take for granted, but then I found out that actually, quite a lot of people in Sydney don’t have food security. This was mind-boggling to me – we live in a first world country, for goodness’ sake. This isn’t something that happens to people overseas in countries we’ve never been to, let alone heard of (hey, some of those Central African countries are really quite obscure), but something that happens to fellow Sydneysiders. Chew on THAT. (Food pun #1)

Food security facts, taken from a survey of households in Warwick Farm, Villawood and Rosemeadow/Ambarvale in Sydney’s South-West:
• 21.9% of households have experienced food insecurity
• 30% of households with children were food insecure
• 45% of single parent households were food insecure.

Food for thought from the lecture (food pun #2):
• Australians throw 3.3million tonnes of food away a year.
• In an attempt to increase food yield, large quantities of fertilizer are used.
• Technology has resulted in the destruction of traditional food systems and subsistence agriculture.

It touches on with the theme from week 7: sustainable development. How can we keep up with the increasing demands of the population without creating more long-term problems? Beatriz spoke about the fact that at the moment, food security in Chian is not as big a problem as was previously expected, because many people in China actually grow their own food. But as China urbanizes and more people move to the city, how will China be able to keep up its food production? Can the world develop technologically and still satisfy that most basic of human needs, the need for food?




Photo: ~Philip-Scammell via deviantART

Our second team meeting

We met up for teamwork on Thursday night, which unfortunately was the only time we could meet up but we thought it was important. Personally I feel like what we accomplished in that meeting could have been accomplished without meeting up, but at least the meeting proved our commitment.

During the meeting, we defined our question and organised team roles further. We also set a timetable for ourselves, so that by next week we would have found all our info and the week after we should have done the filming part of our presentation. We all recognised that having a clear definition and a definite timetable would make things a lot easier, which showed that we had similar priorities and ways of learning.

Communication was a balance between work and education commitments which was fun.
Ratings:

Productivity: 8
Communication: 8 (although everyone was tired and the yawning was a bit infectious)

Team Survey

Strengths and Weaknesses

Una, Jemma and I come from similar backgrounds (all studying Spanish, and Una and Jemma are studying education), which has its pros and cons.

Pros include the fact that we think along the same lines and it’s easier to make decisions. Cons include the fact that we need to work harder to diversify. But I think it’s something that we can easily overcome by focusing on interests apart from our university majors.

As a group, our strengths include co-operation, participation and communication. Our weaknesses include time management – we’re all quite busy and we find it very difficult to meet up. But because we communicate well (thanks to the internet) and co-operate with each other, at this stage quick after-class meetings are all we need. Thankfully with the holidays coming up we’ll be able to meet up more often.


Team Goals

We’re aiming for an informative yet entertaining and interesting presentation, and are trying to achieve at least a high credit or distinction. This is achievable because we keep in contact two or three times a week and we all participate equally.

We’ll need to improve our time management skills if we want a higher mark though but since we have similar goals in mind, we are able to work efficiently. While we do get distracted, it’s not often and generally we’re quite focused. When making decisions, we brainstorm and play off each other’s ideas. This way, if work or ideas are not up to standards, as a team we can also build on it.


Image: ~Ellie-the-dreamer via Deviant Art

Week 6: China and the WTO

An underlying thread running in this week's topic was the difference between academic theory, bureaucratic policy and the reality. One of the questions we discussed in our tutorial on Thursday was whether China's entry into the WTO has been of benefit to everyday citizens, and one aspect we looked at was that while there is no doubt that China's entry into the WTO has changed decision-making in China (Guo, 2008, p. 343), are the general public aware of this? How many of them are aware that there is more openness, and if they are aware, are there actually any actions stemming from it?

Another thing is the difference between what democracy advocates were hoping for, and what has actually happened in China.

"Moreover, the openness resulting from the reforms is predominantly economic openness, which has not posed a serious threat to the dominance of the CCP or translated into a demand for political liberalization and democracy. These findings cast doubt on the common assumption that external openness somehow leads to internal openness or that political openness inevitably ensues from economic openness." (Guo, 2008, p. 341)

Again, what sounds good in theory doesn't necessarily translate to real life. For many Western people, democracy and freedom of speech etc. are not just a way of life, they are life. However, the Communist party has spent several decades indoctrinating a mindset and cultivating a lifestyle for the Chinese people, so that such freedoms are not expected. While economic openness and reforms are one step towards democracy, they will not change the mindset of a people. What's more, is forced democracy truly democracy? Perhaps what the think tanks of the 21st century need is to recognise that both social paradigms and political paradigms play a part in changing and shaping a country, and that a balance between the two is needed if any "progress" is to be made towards democracy in a country, not just China.


Image: JingWei/ImagineChina