Final Blog: Transformative Learning

When I first signed up for Writing 60, I just wanted to get my A2 requirement out of the way, and I thought "Oh, an online course? This will be a piece of cake." How astronomically wrong I was to think that.

Personally, I found this class to be one of my most difficult out of my college experience. Not that writing is ever really easy, but research writing is especially difficult. However, this is also the only course where I was able to contact a teacher directly and was given the professor's phone number on the syllabus and was truly encouraged to contact frequently.

I only had one Zoom call with Professor McClure, but I truly feel like he encouraged collaboration with me on my scicomm paper. I didn't think I would be able to rework it fully from the ground up, and yet, somehow it happened. Collaborating with a professor is one thing I haven't done before, but definitely a moment I would describe as a transformative experience in my learning. Most professors seem very intimidating and hard to reach out to, so the tasks that are assigned are harder to approach. But this experience really changed my perspective on how I can work with my teacher to further my learning, rather than just do what they tell me.

Towards the end of the quarter, when I was really stressing about writing my scicomm article, the best advice Professor McClure gave me was to replicate the examples we were given in class. So I studied those other scicomm articles from the first two weeks. I really did. I went back into my McGraw-Hill Connect and re-read "Backyard Beasts of Prey" until the structure made sense to me. Even though I thought I did so the first time, I didn't really study the structure and narrative before. It wasn't until I was writing my own scicomm article that I was able to connect the pieces that built the narrative Goldman wrote, until I could connect it to my own. So I think that would be my second transformative learning experience. You can complete assignments and sometimes not even learn a thing, and other times, in order to finish an assignment, you need to go back and revisit the basics of what you learned before, and re-learn it.

One major problem I had looking back, was that I definitely should have watched a tutorial video on how to learn Wix beforehand. Towards the end while I was trying to clean up my website, I ran into so many problems I had to just delete things and make a new page to reorganize my information. I have used other website editing softwares before, but Wix really is it's own beast. In the future, I'll have to start my organization on this stuff early on, rather than having to change the website last minute.

Another huge issue I had was the fact that I had to rewrite my scicomm article. I chose a comprehensive literature review at the start, and tried to use that as my main article, instead of using it as a tool to find a better article. Then I was left with rushing what I had to write until the very end and rushing the process. While I do like the narrative I did end up writing, I wish I could have avoided that problem earlier on. In the future, I'd want to stick closer with the format of the examples I am given, and spend more time researching a good source than try to rush through an assignment with a bad source.