Twitter Tuesday: Week 10

We have come to our final twitter Tuesday of the quarter for week 10. Today we were assigned to reflect on the things we have learned this quarter. Whether it was about the content taught, the research we found, or anything we felt like we learned through this class. Getting to learn more about dogs and their social dynamics, cognitive abilities, and intelligence is something that has brought me a new found appreciation for all of my pups and their magnificent brains. Getting to research them throughout the course and the struggles that they face was rewarding in a sense that now that I know more, I can help more. Learning how to write in SciComm style was incredibly interesting as I had not done anything like it before and even found myself struggling a bit since I was used to strictly academic APA research style writing and did not know how to properly interrgrate narrative elements. However, this class challenged me to think beyond what I already know about research and apply it in a way that makes the research simple and accessible to a wide variety of readers. Finally, learning how to design this website was one of the most frustrating but fun things I’ve ever had to do for a class. Getting to write blog posts and figuring out how to properly design a page to make things appealing and highlight what was most important will serve me well as I move on as creative director for UCSB mock trial.

Getting to also take a look at what my classmates learned throughout the quarter created a sense of community that I did not know was possible with a completely asynchronous online course. Seeing that they felt like they had learned something that I did too, had a cool experience, or interesting part of their research to share was incredible. One common thing I saw is that we were all surprised how twitter could play such a vital role in research and the development of our writing, I would have never expected to be using twitter for a college class but here we are!

We ended our final twitter Tuesdays with following researchers from our respective fields of study. For me, that’s Political Science and I was able to find so many awesome professors that use their twitter accounts to spread knowledge one of them being Lynn Vavreck (@vavreck) who is a professor of American politics at UCLA. She reposts a lot of articles and podcasts about political science that I think can be helpful for me as I move forward into my major.

As I start to pack up tomorrow to move out of my freshman year dorm on Saturday, I can’t help but feel nastolgic as I look back at the beginning of this class and realizing how little I really knew about writing. It was great to not only reflect and express what I’ve learned from this class but awesome

to see other people feel the same.

Till next time…