A Reflection

Licensed under CC0, source: pexels.com

Over the past four months, I've blogged here every week about the concepts and applications I've learned about in a course at the University of Arizona. The course focused on group and online collaboration, and ultimately led us to see that the online world has opened up essentially the world to collaborate with us.

Over the last semester, I've seen real application of concepts I had touched on in previous courses. Through examples and real life blogging for class I have learned how the world is your audience in a digital world. I think the most important thing I've taken away from this class is that the culture I've now grown up with has become a part of how we collaborate with others in the future. I never thought about how memes or ReCaptcha affects our lives. They were simply elements of daily life. We send memes among friends, we fill out ReCaptcha for signing up for websites. It's now become second nature. Our second nature is to collaborate with others through the internet. I've talked about several topics on this blog, including collaborating on YouTube and how the gender gap is still prevalent in the online world. I also interacted with several classmates' blogs this semester, including Lara' post on remixing in the music industry and Evan's post on being a former Wikipedia troll.

Throughout this blogging experience, I've found my classmates' work to be both inspiring and insightful.

The first blog I've found to be insightful was Evan's blog. As I mentioned earlier I interacted with his blog, but I think he also often offered a unique perspective on some of the topics we discussed over the semester. His perspective was often different from my own, and I think there was a lot to learn from his own experiences, which he shared on his blog.

The second blog I found to be insightful was Beau's blog.

He always offered insight into course topics, and most of the time related it back to his own experience with the topic. I often enjoyed reading his posts because they were self reflective and applied course material.

For the best student blog in the class, I would nominate Shannon's blog. Although Shannon and I did not get the chance to personally get to know each other this semester, I always enjoyed the tone and writing style of her posts. It always felt real, and like you were talking with Shannon about the topic of her post. I think the best blogs are the one where we feel as though we get to peek inside someone's thoughts, and Shannon's does just that.

With that, that's a wrap on this semester! It's been fun getting to write every week, as well as interact with my classmates this semester, and I learned so much from all of it too! xo