Digital literacies was a completely new term to me, and the course was a unique and a different one. Before taking this course, I had no idea about digital literacies’ meaning and I was a little bit worried about the course at the beginning of the semester. However, it turned out to be something completely different, enjoyable and most importantly informative.
This course made me explore and know new things about my personality, I have always been the quiet student in class and ever since we switched to online learning, I could say that this is the only course where I got to participate with the students and my professor confidently. I enjoyed the group activities and the breakout rooms specifically. The fact that we used to split almost every class made me get to speak and interact with different students, which made me feel more comfortable and I was able to participate with them, and most importantly the conversations we had together made me feel that I was getting closer to them, and this made me feel that it was as if we were taking the class on campus. I also enjoyed writing blogposts. I loved how my blog posts were personal and were mostly based on my personal experiences, and this made me feel that I was listened to. This takes me to the self-development assignment specifically; this assignment was my favorite because I got to reflect on my online learning journey. This year was a tough one, it affected me psychologically and the fact that I got to pause and reflect on this experience made me learn new things about my personality and I was able to work on them and fix them and this has helped me a lot academically throughout this semester. (link to my blogposts:https://wordpress.com/posts/reemusamasblog.wordpress.com ) In addition, I have learnt a lot of information about digital literacies. Choose your digital literacy pathway assignment was one of my favorite assignments because it was rich with new information that I have never learnt about. The difference between digital skills and digital literacy is something everyone should know about because being skillful with a certain online platform doesn’t mean that I know how to use it, we need to understand the content we share fits in the context and suits the platforms’ users or not. I learnt tons of new information just by doing this assignment (link to my blog about choose your digital literacy pathway: https://wordpress.com/post/reemusamasblog.wordpress.com/116 ) and I would definitely share this information with my family and friends.
One of my favorite experiences in this course was Soliya. On of my dreams is to travel all around the world, learn about new cultures and traditions of different countries. Participating in Soliya made me feel that I have traveled to a couple of different countries because I have engaged with around 5 or more students who come from different countries; I learnt a lot about their different cultures and traditions and I even got to make friends, and all of that was behind a screen. I am very glad and proud of myself that I have participated in this experience because I never knew that I would be able to do all of that specially that everything is online. I would definitely tell my friends about this experience and I would share with them the link to participating in the Soliya connect program so that they get to gain the same experience and knowledge. If I were to show someone my learning in this course, they would be soliya, my blogpost because it has all my reflections about the different assignments, showing the things that I learnt, and finally my game. Designing this game was a different experience because I never tried to design a game before. (Links to the game: https://wordpress.com/post/reemusamasblog.wordpress.com/126 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSethOQTpWSTsF89tDKHWI-SkKWSStKzVOvh3vQUglSbSoF5AA/viewform )
Moreover, there aren’t many things that I would like to change about this course, but I believe that the game needed more feedback sessions. I personally needed more people to play the game and give me their opinions about it, I think that we could have created a google document where all students port their game’s 4th draft and we would be given 2 or 3 days to play all the games and give each other feedback and comments. Also, watching more ted talks or videos in class would have made us engage more and have more discussions together during the class. And finally, I would have loved to watch the coded bias movie together in class and have a discussion about it, it would make us gain different information from each other and share together our different perspectives.
Finally, I believe that this course would be beneficial for everyone, but it would be more beneficial for introverts or people who barely engage with others because the level of engagement in this class is very high. Also, this course gave us different opportunities and was full of different choices, we were given the choice to choose between the wheel of life and the gratitude journal, I chose the gratitude journal because I wanted to write blogposts and work on my writing skills because I barely get to write due to my major (architectural engineering) and this was very beneficial to me. However, there were some assignments where we had different opportunities or choices but I thought that they were almost the same with minimal differences, such as choosing between a movie or some ted talks, therefore they were not very valuable in my point of view. In a nutshell, this course was one of the best courses that I have taken through out the past 4 years, and I am very grateful for this opportunity.