Reflective letter by John Coolen
I’m writing this reflection to tell you, the reader, quite frankly about the challenges and triumphs I have accomplished while completing this course. To start off, I want to say that this course has taught me a lot about technology and the research that can be used to go with it. Everything I was able to absorb mentally in this class will be a great help for when I’m out there researching in the real world. Each class was interesting and never dull, the assignments well worth my time and the outcomes of each assignment were done in a way so that I would be able to repeat them again if I ever needed to.
To start off the class we all had to create a website on Weebly to share our course projects and blogs about readings/classwork with everyone else in the course. I really liked making a website on Weebly because we were allowed to make our home page as personal as we wanted. This was good news to me because I used to study web design in county college, so having complete control of what I wanted to put on my front page was quite fun. As stated before, in Weebly there is a section for blogs, where each student had two write 250 word blogs about certain readings or goings on in class assignments. This was a place where the student could talk about anything that may have been bothering them with the class/assignments and ponder questions on how to better themselves. I found this part of Weebly okay because it was a place for one to really express himself or herself in the subject but at the same time it was kind of invasive. I felt this way because anyone could look at your blog and vice versa. In that regard one had to be careful of what they wrote, as not to offend any of the readers.
Our next assignment was a class project called “Twitterive”. We were told to sign up for Twitter and add all the other students in our class. I never had a twitter before, so tweeting and hash-tagging was quite new to me. The underlying purpose of the Twitterive project was to select a couple of your tweets and make a story from it. Sadly, I don’t think I was “creative” enough for this assignment. Even though I did try my hardest at doing exactly what the outline of the assignment asked I believe I may have missed what this assignment was really asking of me. I found twitter quite tedious, as I don’t like relaying personal information for the world to see and reply to. The only story I could come up with was the repetend (repeated word or phrase throughout the twitter to link it together, we had to have one) of me complaining. I had a lot of tweets about me complaining because, well, I didn’t even like tweeting, as you know. Anyhow, after creating a story about some ongoing complaints in my life, I was forced to present my Twitterive to the class. Unfortunately, I found this very uncomfortable, as most of the people in the class had done their Twitterive on something personal and made their presentation kind of emotional. So I went up and presented and got the assignment over with and after it was done I realized something. That presenting personal information wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Everyone was kind and receptive, alleviating my fears that my project wasn’t done “personal” enough.
Oral History was the next project our class was tasked to complete. Our courses oral history project had to do with food since we just finished watching “Food Inc”. My partner and I sought out a mutual acquaintance that we knew was vegetarian. We did this so we could ask him/her questions about her association with food and being a vegetarian. I found interviewing this person quite interesting, as we learned a lot about what it’s like to be a vegetarian/vegan and all the irritation and tribulation that can come with it. From here my partner and I took the interview and made it into a story about the real life of a vegetarian/vegan. I found this project to be quite fun actually, I liked learning new things about the person I interviewed and forming a creative non-fictional piece from conversation that transpired during.
Finally, we were given our last project for the course, the collaborative research project. This project was probably the hardest, most involved, research paper I’ve ever had to do. First, my group decided to do an interview with a grocer on how organic meat was made and how healthy it really was. But, unfortunately we could not find a grocer willing to do an interview so the documentary option of this project could not be fulfilled. So my partner and I changed our research project and were tasked with writing a 5-7-page research paper on our subject of organic meat. From here my partner and I narrowed down the topic of organic meat to how it is produced and whether organic meat is more ethical and healthy than non-organic meat. We then had to check out countless books and research journals to find a non-biased source that had statistics that proved what we were looking for. All in all the paper was quite a hassle to write with so many other things going on in the last week of the semester, but we managed to do it and for that I am quite proud.
I’m writing this reflection to tell you, the reader, quite frankly about the challenges and triumphs I have accomplished while completing this course. To start off, I want to say that this course has taught me a lot about technology and the research that can be used to go with it. Everything I was able to absorb mentally in this class will be a great help for when I’m out there researching in the real world. Each class was interesting and never dull, the assignments well worth my time and the outcomes of each assignment were done in a way so that I would be able to repeat them again if I ever needed to.
To start off the class we all had to create a website on Weebly to share our course projects and blogs about readings/classwork with everyone else in the course. I really liked making a website on Weebly because we were allowed to make our home page as personal as we wanted. This was good news to me because I used to study web design in county college, so having complete control of what I wanted to put on my front page was quite fun. As stated before, in Weebly there is a section for blogs, where each student had two write 250 word blogs about certain readings or goings on in class assignments. This was a place where the student could talk about anything that may have been bothering them with the class/assignments and ponder questions on how to better themselves. I found this part of Weebly okay because it was a place for one to really express himself or herself in the subject but at the same time it was kind of invasive. I felt this way because anyone could look at your blog and vice versa. In that regard one had to be careful of what they wrote, as not to offend any of the readers.
Our next assignment was a class project called “Twitterive”. We were told to sign up for Twitter and add all the other students in our class. I never had a twitter before, so tweeting and hash-tagging was quite new to me. The underlying purpose of the Twitterive project was to select a couple of your tweets and make a story from it. Sadly, I don’t think I was “creative” enough for this assignment. Even though I did try my hardest at doing exactly what the outline of the assignment asked I believe I may have missed what this assignment was really asking of me. I found twitter quite tedious, as I don’t like relaying personal information for the world to see and reply to. The only story I could come up with was the repetend (repeated word or phrase throughout the twitter to link it together, we had to have one) of me complaining. I had a lot of tweets about me complaining because, well, I didn’t even like tweeting, as you know. Anyhow, after creating a story about some ongoing complaints in my life, I was forced to present my Twitterive to the class. Unfortunately, I found this very uncomfortable, as most of the people in the class had done their Twitterive on something personal and made their presentation kind of emotional. So I went up and presented and got the assignment over with and after it was done I realized something. That presenting personal information wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Everyone was kind and receptive, alleviating my fears that my project wasn’t done “personal” enough.
Oral History was the next project our class was tasked to complete. Our courses oral history project had to do with food since we just finished watching “Food Inc”. My partner and I sought out a mutual acquaintance that we knew was vegetarian. We did this so we could ask him/her questions about her association with food and being a vegetarian. I found interviewing this person quite interesting, as we learned a lot about what it’s like to be a vegetarian/vegan and all the irritation and tribulation that can come with it. From here my partner and I took the interview and made it into a story about the real life of a vegetarian/vegan. I found this project to be quite fun actually, I liked learning new things about the person I interviewed and forming a creative non-fictional piece from conversation that transpired during.
Finally, we were given our last project for the course, the collaborative research project. This project was probably the hardest, most involved, research paper I’ve ever had to do. First, my group decided to do an interview with a grocer on how organic meat was made and how healthy it really was. But, unfortunately we could not find a grocer willing to do an interview so the documentary option of this project could not be fulfilled. So my partner and I changed our research project and were tasked with writing a 5-7-page research paper on our subject of organic meat. From here my partner and I narrowed down the topic of organic meat to how it is produced and whether organic meat is more ethical and healthy than non-organic meat. We then had to check out countless books and research journals to find a non-biased source that had statistics that proved what we were looking for. All in all the paper was quite a hassle to write with so many other things going on in the last week of the semester, but we managed to do it and for that I am quite proud.