Hello my beautiful friends and family, today I will do part one of the final reflection in the course since the semester is sadly coming to an end. In part one, I will reflect on the course as a whole and the aspects that I enjoyed, learned, and will definitely use in my life. Allow me today to be a bit more creative and write the blogpost as a letter for future students who may be interested in taking the course. I would definitely recommend the course for all students because the course is really fun, informative, and creates a family like members of students.
Dear digital literacies course students, today I will write to you a small letter to demonstrate my time throughout the course and what I learned and enjoyed. I want to give you all a little taste about this beautiful course that I really enjoyed taking, attending, discussing with fellow students, and learning great digital skills. Today, the world heavily relies on technology and with the unprecedented pace of improving technologies, the skills acquired from this course, at least for me, is essential to be up to date with what is happening in the digital world. To start off, I learned a few things about myself this course like I like to write blogs and feel happy when I get interactions and feedback from my peers, something that many of the prospect students might find out about themselves. In addition, I really realized that I love to work in a multi-cultural group where I attended the Soliya program and held discussion with people who have multiple backgrounds and cultures. Also, the professor arranged for a meeting with students from Germany where I really enjoyed talking to fellow German students about their curriculum and mainly chatting about football and the car industry in Germany, the biggest car market in the world! What really enhanced this ability and made me realize this fact about me is the activities done in the Soliya program and attending meetings on a weekly basis further improved this skill. Therefore, if you are to take this course, you’re very likely to know more things about yourself that you didn’t know you enjoyed before, making you more mature and more comfortable in your overall life.
Secondly, I want to mention some of the skills that I attained throughout this semester and this course that will definitely help me in my academic life. I learned heavily throughout the course about the hot topic nowadays of Ai and how was it first implemented, how it collects data, and how it is designed to respond to certain questions and refrain from answering other ones. Many courses nowadays may require the usage of Ai to finish an assignment, search for further sources or references, create citations for sources, or even summarize a paper. This really helps in saving time and make me focus on more and get more stuff done in same amount of time. A simple example to make this clear is imagine you need to bake a cake, if you have the time and really care to perfect the recipe, then you will make it from scratch. On the other hand, if you don’t have enough time and don’t really care about the taste you can buy a cake from the grocery store. In the latter, you save time and the taste is not terrible but if you had the time, you would have done a better tasting cake maybe and even add the toppings that you wanted to add.
Thirdly, I learned to get to know more people in my bubble and to be close as if we are family members. I did this by being available to help my classmates, making them feel listened to and relaxed, and having valuable discussion that make us bond even stronger. I learned this throughout the course because the professor always kept others silent when someone is talking, saying that this is a good manner and we should respect each other and this made us bond even more because everyone felt respected and gave respect back too. This will definitely help me in my social life because it will make me more comfortable to meet people, bond with them, and become an overall better social person rather than being silent or alone.
In addition, the course made me realize, and improved my ability, to hold multi cultural discussions with people that have various backgrounds and ideologies. I was introduced to a great program, the Soliya program, where I interacted and discussed a plethora of topics with people with different backgrounds. I was happy I interacted well with them, I was engaging, asking both thoughtful and mindful questions, and I was fun to be around, at least for my coordinator who said that! Also, we held a group session with German students in class and they were very fun and kind, something that surprised me because I have this preconceived notion that Germans are harsh and strict but the students who I discussed with were very friendly and kind. Therefore, in this class you will not only learn about new topics like Ai and digital literacies and skills, but also you will learn about yourself making you more mature and more aware of who you truly are!
Moreover, I would like to share with you three things that I created that truly represent what you will learn in this class and some of the splendid activities that you will do. Firstly, I want to share with you the game that myself and two of my colleagues created, speaking about gender roles in Egypt and raising awareness to something that many people might not know about. The game represents the huge differences in the lives of Egyptian males and females throughout childhood, young adults, and old people. The game highlights how Egyptians are constructed to behave from a very young age in a certain manner based on the gender in order to conform with society and its norms. In addition, I wanted to share two blogposts that I have created that highlights some of the readings and videos that we did throughout the semester and giving my opinion on them and what I learned from them, which is the pre Soliya reflection. I realized how much I love the Arabic language and how we take it for granted and that we care too much about perfecting our English. Yet, we should perfect out Arabic because it’s our mother tongue and it’s beautiful in the way words are constructed and how different tones due to different punctuations can completely change the meaning and add depths to them. Furthermore, the other blogpost is one that I created in choosing my digital literacy pathway and learning about some of the most important devices in our daily lives nowadays, the mobile phone. I learned about the camera, the touchscreen, the memory and so on. This is not only important to make me aware of the device that I use the most on a daily basis, but because it is related to my major and I really love my major.
Moving on, if I could change some things about the course I would change only three things. Firstly, the timing of the course because it was 8:30 at the morning, I would recommend changing the time to 10 or even 11:30. I personally did not have any problems with the time, but many people feel tired and have no energy to hold discussions in the morning and they just come and stare at others who actually speak. I think if all people truly share their thoughts and feel confident enough and not worried to speak in front of others, the course would have been even more engaging and more informative. I think changing the time of the course will make people feel more awake, alert, and feeling less exhausted or tired so more people will interact and discuss more making the class even better than it already is, and it’s already amazing! In addition, at the final 10 minutes of the last day of classes, we made a very fun activity where people shared some funny videos from instagram or Tiktok and it was amazing and hilarious. I really cried from laughter from some videos and I left the class feeling happy and relaxed, going into the next lecture excited. I would recommend making this activity normal, after every class at the last 5 minutes or so, one or two people share something that they found funny because it creates a strong bond and a family like connection among the students. Finally, I would like to add more activities where students walk around campus and the professor show them stuff around, like the crop yielding field next to the sports complex, or even the closed cycle systems of hydroponics. Did you even know we had a land that grew crops like cabbage on campus? I personally did not and I really enjoyed seeing small plants growing and seeing how beautiful some plants are with their colors like the mix of purple and green plants were truly a beautiful sight to see in the morning. Hence, I would like to have more moving activities in the course because we discover more things about our amazing and humongous campus and see amazing sights.
In one sentence, the kind of person who should take this course is: The person who wants to learn and go beyond just understanding, and have fun in discovering oneself!
In conclusion, I wanted to represent to you what to expect in this course and what will you learn in it. One will have fun and learn about topics that are hot nowadays, and more importantly one will learn about oneself. The course is really amazing and the main factor for this is the professor who really fosters a great learning environment, holds fun activities, cares for the student’s wellbeing, and creates a strong bond among her students!
Here you go my beautiful friends and family, this was part one of the final reflection on the course. I hope you enjoyed this writing style like a letter for upcoming students who might join this, and they really should because they would miss out if they don’t. I would definitely recommend this course to students because they will learn and enjoy this course heavily. Stay tuned for part 2!
billy daily 