Week 1

This is the start of my blogging experience and some might say the opening “ceremony” of my studies at BCA university. The reason I am writing this blog is that it is one of the main focuses of the module "Personal Development for Computing" that I am taking this semester. More specifically, me and the whole class were assigned to express our thoughts and opinion for each week's lecture. However I should add that due to personal reasons I missed the first four weekly lectures, thus meaning that I will try to complete my task by expressing my thoughts via the information available through the intranet. So I will ask you to bear with me for the first four entries of my blog.

I would like to start by saying that I am quite thrilled about this specific module, mainly because it is about something I have never experienced or studied until now. This module is about achieving personal development, learning how to to plan ahead and act accordingly, and I can say that these things can only count as assets for everyone in his personal and academic course. The first part of the module is about understanding what will exactly happen during this semester with this module. In summary Personal Development for Computing module is about the in class lectures, PDP (Personal Development Planning), 2 main assignments that will be completed in different deadlines, readings of tutorials or articles that will help expanding our academic knowledge and make us more open minded in how to react in business environment (and not only there if I may add) and last but not least in doing our homework, aka the weekly blog assignments.

About the 2 main assignments, the first one is about developing a web site whose main theme will be about the history of Computing and we have to do academic research in order to present the information required and to include original writing. The other task is composed by three parts, the first one is about the weekly blog listings, a personal development plan essay and a personal development statement essay.

The next part of this weeks notes is about the fundamental understanding of what PDP and Computing is, as well as how these two can be combined. Computing is discipline that allows a professional to not only obtain besides hardware and software knowledge but also the ethos of a scholar, deeper understanding of technology, how to be able to support organization goals and to help us improve our everyday lifestyle and mentality.

The following part is about the skills needed by most employees in our day and age. These skills are 1) Body language 2) Confidence 3) Practice – refinement of abilities 4) Skills development via self criticism and 5)experience gained through placement.

This concludes what had occurred during this first lecture in a summary.

In general, I can say definitely that through this lecture I grasped way better what is required to be a successful professional in our time. By analyzing what Computing means now I see that one must think out of the box and try to constantly improve himself in every part of his thinking. For example I would like to use as a reference an experience of my own. I was working in a company some time ago that was promoting insurance packages, and despite my knowledge of the packages that was far ahead of other employees there were some who could still sign more deals than I did. By checking what I learned through this week's lecture I can say with certainty that this occurred because of I lacked body language usage and I was unable to take any self-criticism. Hopefully through the Personal Development and Computing module I will be able to overcome my weaknesses and improve even more my other advantages from my past workplaces.

G.