Final Reflective Blog

When I started this course, I was very skeptical about the course work and also spending 15 hours working with a service learning partner. It was hard for me to open up to the idea of working within a digital rhetoric and also volunteering. Throughout my school career I have always had the ability to sneak by doing just the minimum amount of course work, and very successfully obtain high grades. Sadly enough this method has changed very little within my college course work. There have been very few assignments that I have found to be challenging intellectually.

Working with HEP was one of my more challenging assignments I have had since being at BSU. Not only was working with a service learning partner a challenge time wise, but it also challenged my preconceived ideas of the minority group in which I was working. At first I went to HEP trying to be open-minded but shortly fell back into old opinions, not just of the minority groups but also poor opinions of students in general. It wasn't until I was working closer with individual students at HEP and also with my service learning group to analyse, discuss and interpret each assignment and ultimately our video project, that I started to look at the deeper issues and challenges that these students faced. I grew to have a great appreciation for HEP and I have also grown as a student by being challenged by assignments that I could not simply pump out the night before.

Working within a digital rhetoric was the most challenging aspects of this course. I was constantly challenged to adapt my pervious skills to fit into this new medium and speak to an entirely new audience. My writing "style" more than anything benefited from the use of Blogger and Weebly. I started to drop away from writing to my professor and started to embrace an audience that I wanted to reach. Now I must admit, my audience is obscure and I'm not sure I really have one, other than the random student who stumbles upon this blog. But however obscure this audience maybe, it helped me to develop a deeper thought process about what I was saying and how I want to say it. Creating my website was the most challenging in respects to writing to this audience. I struggled to stay focused on the intended audience, parents of special education student. I began to move away from writing to them an created a tone that was over complicated and hard to relate to.

By revisiting the course readings, I believe that I will be able to come back to these assignments and narrow them into something that is more concise and better directed to my intended audience. Overall this course has provided me with many opportunities that I did not anticipate having from an English class.