Even though it’s my final blog in this course, it won’t be my final blog forever. Through this course I learned how to write blogs posts and share them using WordPress. I haven’t been the kind of a person who shares thoughts on online platforms or social media, but I think I found myself in this aspect of technology. Now, I believe I can really contribute to online users throughout blogging. I always had this bad perception about online posts that they don’t simulate reality unless they are posted on credible websites. I think this bad idea developed as a result of social media since it was my first experience connecting to the internet when I was a child. People say: first impression lasts. Even though my first impression that was influenced by fake people on social media was bad, it won’t last from now on. I, basically, discovered another tool to learn, which is writing blog posts. No need to say that this was the most important thing to learn in this course.
In order not to be vague, I consider writing blog posts a tool to learn because I gain experiences and knowledge through making researches to transfer such knowledge to the audience. I conduct such researches using credible websites, and that takes us to another thing I learned from this course, which basically the skill to differentiate between fake and credible news and articles. I developed this skill through some activities throughout the semester such as fake news group activity in which I collaborated with my colleague, Loujian, to find one fake news, true news, and another one that’s fake or true. This skill is one of the main factors that will help me in the rest of my academic life to spot fake headlines and articles’ titles.
The materials and learning outcomes of this course are more realistic compared to other courses I have ever taken. Students from all majors can take this course and learn as well. For example, a political science major student can learn how people interact online, what their motives are, and what influences them through curation activity for example. A psychology major student can effectively learn from articles that we used to read about people traits online such as digital confidence profile. Further, the course obviously can help a MICT student how to be digitally literate though many activities such as Read and annotate, and Fake or Not Fake assignment. For me, my best part of interest that helped me in my major concentration was the game. Even I worked on the idea in order to help other people learn something, I think what I really learnt was constructing the scoring system using visual basic. I have never written visual basic code before and I never thought it can be integrated with Microsoft Office. As every CS student, I was proud that I could make this part of my game work even though it didn’t require much effort compared to the projects we build in our CS department. Moreover, I won’t skip a career presentation without integrating visual basic features in it since I’m sure that my audience will always be surprised.
On top of all what I learnt in this course comes Soliya experience. It was one of the experiences that I will always remember. I consider this experience as a short trip with the people I met in Soliya. In this trip, we visited each Soliya member’s country. I could easily know about their cultures and thoughts about religion. I socially enhanced my communication skills on how to open constructive talks. I also mentioned in my Soliya refection more examples about my experience, which I, undoubtedly, never forget.
If I would pick three things to show them to others, I would pick firstly my Curation assignment. I would like to transfer to others knowledge through people who can effectively influence them, such as Da7ee7 and Ahmed Samir (Egypchology Youtuber). Secondly, I would pick my game. I have many friends who drive but they have no idea about road conventions and car technicalities. Thus, I would like to show them, and other people as well, such conventions and convey to them driving rules in an attractive and interactive way. Moreover, my game show how much someone learns from this course to some extent, so I would like to present it to interested people. Finally, I would like to tell others about Soliya and how much someone can improve his social skills through this program.
A reflection about an experience, class, or event needs to include also some modifications. The most important modification I would like to add to this class is the group work. Even though we had some group work activities and presentations, they weren’t enough. So I would suggest that there will be more group work activities in which students can know more about the rest of the class. The second thing I would suggest is to have more presentations whether individual or in group. The presentation shall be kind of informal and short. Otherwise, I really enjoyed every single activity, talk, article and video shared in and outside the class.
I would suggest that the person taking this class be kind of extrovert in order to get the most out of it, but that doesn’t mean that an introvert person, like me, won’t learn.
Finally, I would like to say that even while writing this reflection, I was learning. While looking for a way to make my reflection kind of creative, I have discovered an online tool that converts text to video. The link of the tool is attached below and you can watch the video below, it was my trial to convert my reflection to an interactive video. Thank you Dr. Maha for this awesome course 🙂