Reflective Letter

Here I am going to review my work in my Writing Research and Technology class. I have broken it down into three sections and I am going to talk about the things I have learned about in each section.

Writing:
        
My writing has imporoved over the past semester. The types of writing required for this class challenged me to open my writing style and stray from my traditional essay style writing. Before taking this class my writing styles consisted of three genres: essay, short story and poem. I wasnt very familiar with multi-modal pieces, blogging,  or tweeting. Over the course I felt like the most challenging tyoe of writing for me to do was the blogging. At first my blogs were all the same. They were long essay style chuncks that looked bad on my page. I had trouble breaking away from that style because I was bloggin for assignments and I knew a professor would be reading them. It wasnt  until the blogs became our choice that I tried some new things. I used video, audio and pictures in my blogs to break away from the straight summary/narrative. I even played around with different ways of writing such as recipes. I decided that it was more fun to write the blogs like this. I had more freedom and my blog started feeling more like a blog and less like an 8 page research paper. I also used the idea of multi-modal writing in my Twitterive. It began like a short story and then I broke it up and played with the way it looked on the web page. I have found that web writing isnt just about the writing it is also about the presentation and appeal of the page. I used different size text, photos, poems and narrative to write my piece. Another new writing experience this class has provided me is the aspect of collaborative writing. In other classes I have obviously written alone, so to be in a group and write, it was different. It took more planning and more patience. I usually prefer to work alone becasue you dont have to deal with anyone else and the process runs smmother for me. However, I found that I actually really enjoyed the group writing this time. My group members were helpful and we all combined ideas in order to create the best version of all our ideas. The most difficult thing about the collaborative writing was the organizing who would do what and what our main focus was, but other than that the writing was easy.

Research:

Before this class I hated researching things. I would avoid it mostly but it was a big portion of this class. However, I found that if you a researching a topic that you are interested in the research is much easier. After all of the readings we were assigned I became aware of different types of research. I used to only use Google or a school data base and read articles. I think my favorite type of research was the interviews. I liked the semi-structured interviews my group conducted. I like scheduling a time and bringing a set of questions, but not having to ask every single one of them. I felt like hearing stories as a form of research kept me interested and made me want to know more about our topic. Another thing I wasnt used to doing for research was the annotated bibliography. I have had to site sources before but never had to summarize them as well. I didnt like this part becasue either I put too much description or not enough description. This was my least favorite part of researching, however, I can see the point of using one. It helps with organization. I have found qualitative and quantitative research to be some of the most helpful research for our collaborative project. We are using a documentary for our project and we needed to use statistics about obesity and fast foods in America.

Technology:

I am so technologically illiterate, it's not even funny. Before this class I could turn a computer on, use email accounts, social networking and microsoft programs. Now I feel moderatly literate regarding my technology skills. I have become aware of how to make my own website using Weebly, which is what this site is made from. It was simple to use because the items can be dragged down to the page and I would fill in the elements. It made making a website a fun thing to do. I liked playing around with the texts, the fonts, and the layout. I spent hours making the picture collage seen at the top of my webpage. It made me feel creative and important. I even have my Twitter feed displayed on my home page. Twitter is something I have been exposed to in previous classes, but never really stuck with becasue I didnt really see the point in it to be honest. I guess its becasue I didnt fully understand twitter, it felt silly to just Tweet things whenever and like just read other Tweets and not directly socialize like you can on Facebook. Now I see twitter and a fun resource for new, interesting articles and facts. I have grown to like tweeting, I find it a nice way to get ideas out. Its like mini-blogging. 140 characters may seem short, but that means that every word you pick needs to be important. There is no room for filler sentances, just straight facts. I also used another new tyoe of technology, tape recorders and videos. This was new to me because I have never needed to use a tape recorder and honestly it was so frustrating. I mean the actual use of the tape recorder was easy but the process of taking the files and uploading them was difficult. My group ran into problems becasue the files were VOC files and we needed to convert them into WAV files in order to listen to them and then edit them. After we got that part done the editing was easier. Phil used windows movie maker and uploaded them that way.

Conclusion:

There is technically no conclusion, but I reallly didnt know how to end this and I didn't want an abrupt ending. I liked this class and learned a few things about myself, not only as a writer but as a student as well. I leanred that, contrary to my own belief, I do work well with others and I do like collaborative writing more than I had anticipated.