Reflective Narrative
At the start of this course I would have been lying if I said I didn't feel a little overwhelmed. I was nervous about creating a website and writing a weekly blog. The twitterive assignment just flat out scared me and I had no idea what to think of a collaborative research project. I am not the most technological savvy student, after all, you can read in my blog that I am not a digital native. So the idea of creating a website where all our assignments would be posted and reviewed really made me nervous. Once the work was under way my feelings of being overwhelmed slowly dissipated.
The first few weeks of class we worked on creating our weebly's. I was truly surprised at how easy the site was to navigate, and I was grateful for the step-by step instruction we had in class. I did find the site somewhat frustrating at times, especially when it didn't save an hour's worth of work, but overall my experience with weebly has been a positive one. I actually enjoyed creating the weebly and exploring the different capabilities of the site. Overall, I am happy with the final outcome of my website.
Throughout the course we were asked to keep a weekly blog. At first I was very nervous about the blog. Don't get me wrong, I love to write, but my best writing is when it is on it's own terms. I had never written a blog before, I had no idea how to even start. Once I got the hang of posting blogs, I started to enjoy the blogging process. My favorite blogs that we wrote were the ones about our native places and strange places.
Throughout the course we were asked to keep a weekly blog. At first I was very nervous about the blog. Don't get me wrong, I love to write, but my best writing is when it is on it's own terms. I had never written a blog before, I had no idea how to even start. Once I got the hang of posting blogs, I started to enjoy the blogging process. My favorite blogs that we wrote were the ones about our native places and strange places.
When we started the twitterive process I was scared to death. For starters, I was very unfamiliar with twitter. I already had a twitter account but I probably only used it a total of two times before this course. I had always used and preferred Facebook. Once I got started on Twitter I really enjoyed it. I found myself tweeting quite a bit more than I thought I would. The only problem was my tweets were all over the place. My tweets ranged from marathon training to thoughts on technology. I didn't know how I was going to create a twitterive from any of me tweets. I deliberated for a long time about my twitterive until the idea came to me in one of our classes. We were discussing the project when I realized how many people were creating personal twitterive's. That's when I had the greatest idea ever! I would create my twitterive on the birth of my daughter.
My daughter was born 8 weeks early and spent the first month of her life in the NICU at Virtua Hospital in Voorhees, NJ. During this time I kept a journal so that I could share the experience with my daughter when she was older. My daughter celebrated her second birthday in January and I had been contemplating making a scrap book about her birth, that's when I realized that I could use the twitterive as a digital scrap book about our experience.
Creating the twitterive was painful at first. It brought back a lot of scary emotions that I experienced during that time but it also brought back some of the best memories I have ever had. I realized how far my daughter has come since then and just how lucky I am to haver her in my life. I am really proud of my twitterive and I hope my daughter will love it as much as I do when she is older. I have shared the twitterive with many of my family and friends and it has been so rewarding to watch the emotions they experience while reading it. I don't believe I have ever worked so hard on a project. I am constantly revising and adding new ideas to the twitterive. This is an assignment I will continue to work on even after the course has ended.
My daughter was born 8 weeks early and spent the first month of her life in the NICU at Virtua Hospital in Voorhees, NJ. During this time I kept a journal so that I could share the experience with my daughter when she was older. My daughter celebrated her second birthday in January and I had been contemplating making a scrap book about her birth, that's when I realized that I could use the twitterive as a digital scrap book about our experience.
Creating the twitterive was painful at first. It brought back a lot of scary emotions that I experienced during that time but it also brought back some of the best memories I have ever had. I realized how far my daughter has come since then and just how lucky I am to haver her in my life. I am really proud of my twitterive and I hope my daughter will love it as much as I do when she is older. I have shared the twitterive with many of my family and friends and it has been so rewarding to watch the emotions they experience while reading it. I don't believe I have ever worked so hard on a project. I am constantly revising and adding new ideas to the twitterive. This is an assignment I will continue to work on even after the course has ended.
I really enjoyed watching the movie, Food Inc, in class. I had no idea what factory farming was all about before I watched this film. The film really made a difference to me, especially as a parent. I don't want to feed my children anything that could make them sick. My heart broke for Kevin's mother in the film. I can't imagine her grief and I hope that Kevin's law will pass. Kevin's story alone was enough for me to change my family's eating habits. Now, I only buy my meat from Whole Foods so that I am informed about where the meat came from. Before watching this film I had never even been inside a Whole Foods market, which led Danielle McCleery and I into our collaborative research project.
Danielle and I had a difficult time coming up with a topic when we started our research project. We knew we wanted to focus on meat and where it came from but we didn't know how exactly we wanted to approach the topic. On April 19th, Danielle and I took a trip to the Whole Foods store in Marlton NJ to see what it was all about. We were both blown away. That's when we decided we would research why people spend more money on their meat at Whole Foods instead of your average grocer. Danielle and I had a great time working on this project together. After we visited Whole Foods we each made separate visits to other grocery stores to explore their meats. We really worked well together, we created a google document so we could collaborate about the project and our research.
I am sad to see this class come to an end. I thoroughly enjoyed the course. I learned quite a bit about creating websites, using twitter, and the food industry. It was refreshing to write about topics that I found interesting. I hope you enjoyed visiting my site and reading my various projects.