Final Blog: Course Reflection

One of the most transformative learning experiences I had with this course, was how to look at all of the animals in our world. Now, I was not a stranger to knowing about the intelligence of animals like dolphins or pigs, however, I usually overlooked animals like birds, specifically crows. I never liked crows or just regular birds, however the first couple weeks in this course showed me their intelligence and surprising social behavior with each other and humans. Every animal, no matter how common or small they are, are capable and intelligent beings and I will no longer continue to overlook them, and neither should anybody. Another transformative learning experiences I had was using technology to do research. I know that social media is a powerful tool, but never would I have ever thought that I would have created an entire website filled with my research. I will forever be proud of the website I designed, which proved difficult at times, and I have even showed my family and friends. With the website, all of my findings could easily be accessed and was a visible reminder of the hard work that I had accomplished during this course.

---

Throughout the course, I believe I have improved in not only my writing skills, but as well as my technology skills. One of the initial things I thought about when I was trying to come up with my problems was my writing skills, specifically with the scicomm article. Before this course, I tended to only write scientific or straight-forward article and I definitely prefer to write informational rather that story-telling. However, with the scicomm article, I needed to utilize both types. I struggled with including story-telling elements like descriptive language and adding figurative language to make the content easier to understand. In order to continue working on this aspect, I will attempt to make things easier to understand by using simpler terminology. I need to remember that a scientific article is not fun for readers when they can't understand any of the terms. The second problem I encountered while being in this course was my research issues. It was usually a little bit difficult to find sources that would fit my idea and what I wanted to write about in my articles and this was especially difficult when I was trying to find a counter-argument for my advocacy project. To continue to work on my research skills, I will try to generalize my searches to a broader topic and then I can narrow down to a specific area with the results I get. Working on both of these problems in the future will make me a better researcher and writer.