The Final Touches: Transformative Blog

This is indeed the last time I shall be updating this blog, can you believe it? It's crazy that time has flown by so fast, and I still feel as if I have so much to do. It's like that feeling of accomplishment that doesn't feel as if you really accomplished anything. It's a weird sensation, but it's all I can think about.

I've learned a lot, more so about using social media as a tool for good, rather than personal entertainment like I always have been. At the start of the quarter, I thought I would be having weekly meetings with my classmates, but I quickly realized that this wasn't the case. I actually preferred using Twitter since I had only been using it for a short while. I was able to learn how to use the platform effectively, and if it weren't for all the tweeting, retweeting, and threads I had to make, I feel like I would still only be liking pictures. I felt I really had a voice, and whenever I got a like or a retweet I felt excited that people were seeing my words and actually learning something from them. When I think back to what I learned this quarter, I want to remember all the people I was able to influence, even if it was only by a little bit.

I also learned how to become a better researcher overall. The Connect exercises helped me a lot by making me do more research on the research, if that makes any sense. Usually I would only look at the article and trust it was reliable, but now I look up the authors and their other work to see if they are an expert in the field. This additional bit of information helped by giving me a bit of insight into what their respective fields were, and prepared me for how I would cite them in my essay. I also found that skimming the titles and subheadings helped me get an idea of what the experiments and results were. Then when I went back to read thoroughly, it made more sense than I thought since I already sort of knew what I would be reading about. Writing small summaries about each section was useful in remembering, and annotating quotes made it so so so much easier to find a good quote once I needed to address it in the essay. I think taking my time with annotating and going at it more meticulously helped me out a lot in the long run; I definitely want to be able to implement the same technique in future classes when I need to write a paper.

I really need to work on my timing though. I was all over the place this quarter and should've done work when I had lots of free time rather than when I was already behind. I missed some assignments because of this, but I'm happy I at least was able to keep up. I think the best I can do is make "pretend" deadlines since I find I work better and harder when under some stress. That or I can start working immediately rather than wait and put it off for the next day. That's what sometimes happened to me: I would say I would do it later and never end up doing it until I was hit with the closing deadline. I also have some other reasons why I was behind at times having to do with health, but I don't want to shift blame to anyone or anything but myself. I am the one willingly taking the course after all.

Another thing I think I struggled with was the reading. As a child, I adored reading and it was all I would ever do. I collected books and learned so much about writing this way, which is why word counts are so much easier to hit for me than reading a certain number of pages, ironically enough. I definitely could've done more reading, and I should've rather than resort to skimming some parts of the text. Besides my current dislike for reading, it also had to do with my timing since I never had time to sit down and actually absorb the text. In the future, I want to try and set aside time when I know I have nothing to work on and read. I think starting casually would help since then I wouldn't feel like it was homework; that's usually what discourages me in the first place.

I have learned much, more in some areas than others. I still have a lot to improve on, and I know it will be a long journey ahead. I can't wait though, and I hope to take some good lessons from this class. For now, however...

This is goodbye to this blog, and this website. I had fun making it, and learning some cool facts about corvids, cetaceans, apes, canines, felines, and every animal in-between.

Signing off...

Emi out!