Week 10: Transformative Learning

A final reflection on my learning experiences during Writing 39C!

One last appreciation picture of the species I researched this course!

Over the course of this class, I have had different transformative learning experiences. One of the most transformative learning experiences I have had is something I have learned that will cause me to act differently in the future. This revolves around social media, specifically Twitter, and how to use it as a platform for education and advocacy. Prior to this class I rarely used Twitter and mostly thought it was a place where people Tweet relatable content for their followers to view and re-tweet. However, after enrolling in Writing 39C I was able to learn how I can utilize Twitter to advocate for animal rights and share important information I learned during my research process. I found countless accounts belonging to credible researchers and organizations I discovered while looking into sharks and their social behavior. These accounts exemplified the vast possibility of the educational usage of Twitter. I was also able to learn a lot about the potential of social media through my own 39canimals Twitter account. On this account I promoted animal advocacy and received attention on my content, displaying how my account was able to make a change no matter how big or small. Moving forward I hope to continue to use social media and my Twitter account to make an impact in this world.

The second biggest transformative learning experience I had is something I will remember when looking back on this course in the future. This experience has to do with all the beneficial researching tips I acquired during the countless house of research I completed on animals, specifically sharks and their social behavior. I learned how to look at research studies and determine if they are good sources as well as annotate them in order to utilize them in writing literature reviews. This is a super helpful skill especially considering there will be many different times in my life where I am bound to research and complete research studies. Prior to this class I had no experience with research. When I initially started researching for this class and reading sources, it took me a great deal of time to read through the source and determine if this was a source I wanted to use. However, with my newly acquired skills I was able to familiarize myself with reading scientific sources, something I will remember and utilize in the future.

I also had some problem areas during this course. One is reading. Reading has always been one of my weaker areas in school. My reading comprehension isn't the best and I was hoping to improve my reading skills significantly during this course. However, I did not improve as much as I would have liked. I feel that I have acquired skills that help me better asses reading research studies, but not as many skills to improve my reading comprehension skills. In order to improve this in the future I hope to read a lot more. I think one important aspect to becoming a better reading is reading a lot. I also hope to read a variety of reading material to really challenge my brain and build up my skills. Another problem area I encountered during this course is time. I am usually good with time management but since this course consisted of countless bigger assignments, I found myself miscalculating how much time I needed to put aside for my assignment. Although I got all of my assignments in on time, I definitely could have gotten some of them in soon. In order to fix this issue in the future, I hope to start my assignments right when they are assigned. This will ensure that I have enough time (plus wiggle room) to complete my assignment before class. With proper scheduling, I think this problem can be taken care of.

I hope you were able to learn about my overall experience with Writing 39C and thank you for tuning in to my blog posts!

All the best,

Pallavi Rajeev