INTRODUCTION : This exercise is based on here 'Laws and Regulations' of this course. What are we going to do in this exercise? - This might be the question arising in your mind. If you have not already guessed from the above title, the central theme of this exercise is - oral communication. While developing this course as a holistic training package, the course-team was quite conscious not to miss out on the component of communication skills. You had a fairly good grind regarding the development of written skills through your earlier exercises.
Also, in the previous section entitled 'Scientific Reporting' familiarized you with the theoretical elements and the ways of communication by means of written words. The main purpose of this exercise is to impress upon you the importance, and the ways of developing and refining the oral communication skills as this is the most commonly used form of communication.
We all use oral communication in one form or the other in our day to day life but its forms of usage at home and at the place of work are different in many ways. If you work in an academic institution, or a governmental laboratory, then you must be familiar with group discussions, debates, panel discussions, brainstorming sessions, seminars and symposia, and so on. These are some of the formats of oral communication. For this exercise, we have chosen the format of group discussion. This, we thought would be an ideal format considering the time constraint. The other advantage of this format is that a number of students can share a common platform at a given time, and the audience can also gain by listening to them. Now your attention is drawn to the main title of the exercise that reads 'Group Interaction why interaction, and not discussion? This is because we expect each and every individual in the group to participate actively and share his/her viewpoints and experiences through this exercise. Another point, whenever you come across the term discussion in this exercise, read it in the sense of interaction.