Unit 2 Reflection
This project was really interesting for me as I obviously wrote the portfolio, but I am also a member of the target audience. The portfolio was about how technology affects learning in college, therefore the intended audience was college students and professors. Because I am on both sides of the paper, I learned a lot and feel like I can apply what I learned and wrote about to my own life. The audience was pretty obvious to me since the paper is about technology in college, it only makes sense that the audience would be students and educators in college. The style and rhetorics I used in the paper were ones I felt were appropriate for my audience. I used professional and mature language and followed traditional rules for papers used in college because I felt this would be most familiar, comfortable and digestible for the audience.
I challenged myself in researching this piece by thoroughly researching the topic and dissecting my sources. I wanted to make sure that what I was claiming was supported by evidence, and that my articles provided credible information from reliable sources. One aspect of my topic is social media and its effect on learning. More specifically, a new mobile platform titled "TikTok" has been criticized for having a negative effect on people's attention spans. This relates to my paper because I talk about how lectures are roughly an hour in length, however, students' attention spans are only 101-15 minutes at a time. This means that without breaks, it is challenging for students to stay engaged in class and not get distracted by social media on their laptops, which are required for basically every class. TikTok is a mobile application that plays videos as long as 3 minutes to as short as 5 seconds that people can swipe through without finishing the video. This allows users to avert their attention within seconds to another short video, which can be addicting and shorten peoples' attention spans outside of the app. I agree with these findings as I've found it extremely difficult to focus in some lectures for the full time, especially with the distractions on my devices. I don't think my perspective has changed much since this project, if anything, it has reinforced what I already found true.
The sources that I used were from a range of sites. My sources were a TedTalk by a college professor, a psychology organization, a New Yorker article, and a college's website. I think my sources could be improved by adding additional sources, but I found the quality of my sources to be of quality for my research. I think further research could be done on how educators can use technology to benefit the academic environment and motivate students to stay engaged while in class, while also allowing breaks for reengaging based on data backed by research.
I was successful in engaging my audience in the pitch homework. I posted a story on my social media, which contains primarily students in college. I got several responses from followers saying that the post made them reflect, which was my goal. I followed up by saying that I would send them the final draft of my portfolio for them to read when it was completed. The audience I did miss in my pitch was college professors, which could be fixed by submitting the pitch to a platform that professors could access. I could definitely apply one of the methods from this project to another class. I take a class about research methods in biology, and I think that I could use the method of sending my pitch or research findings out to the public to educate people and get their feedback. I could also use my method for finding sources, especially scientific articles, to find a research project that I can present for my final project at the end of the year. Overall, I learned a lot from this project about this topic, finding quality sources, and how I can use those skills in my everyday life and other classes.
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