Course Reflection
ENC 1102
12-04-13
Throughout
the semester I felt my writing has expanded and changed through this research
project. A big part of that was due to the extensive redrafts and critical
thinking of peer reviews and teacher comments that were made during the
process, which overall made great impacts on the paper itself. Overall I feel
like I have improved as a writer.
One
course outcome that I sometimes
struggled in but persevered was outcome three, reading, analyzing and
synthesizing texts and evidence to support my writing. This especially was relevant
within my literature review. When I first did the draft of my literature review
I was unsure how to go about connecting the ideas of different researchers to
show how they interrelated into each other. I referred to the examples we had
read over the course of the semester to get an idea of how to analyze and
compare the papers I had researched. After the peer review I had made major
changes. One of the peer reviews that I had gotten back had said " Though
the paper has good flow it lacks some evidence in the point you are trying to
make. Try to explain a bit better the research question you are trying to
make." The third draft was much
better in some aspects but after receiving feedback from the teacher's though there were some parts in the literature
review that were okay, it still could be much better overall. The final draft
showed connections in the ideas presented by others researchers while
demonstrating critical thinking of how it supported the gap that I was trying
to make out to support my writing.
Another
course outcome that greatly affected my research was outcome 5, developing flexible strategies for revising,
editing and proofreading writing. I think when we did workshops in class and
were able to talk with our peers it was more of faster feedback for me because
I could edit and revise my papers on the spot which is what I did most of the
time. My literature review from the 2nd draft I felt had greatly improved after
we did peer review of them and I was also able to have some of my peers review
my third draft as well after I received the second draft from the instructor.
Now though I am saying second and third draft, I revised more than three
times, over several times I did revise
my literature I am just referring to when we had to turn in or share our paper
with our peers which was about three times. I also went back several times and
read aloud the paper to make sure the reading of the paper made sense and
double checked myself to make sure there were no grammatical errors because
sometimes word check misses something in the paper. I felt I was very matriculate in this paper
checking for every detail to be right which I have rarely done in the past and
I feel very proud of myself for working so hard on this paper.
I
believe the course outcome that I excelled the most in was outcome two, to
engage in a meaning, dynamic, and inquiry-based research process. I was able to
find and work around some limited sources for this research project since I was
trying to find research that was based more on a college students social
interactions affected by social media rather than their academics being
affected by them in which there were many studies done on. The research
question I posed was how a college students social interaction is affected by
social media or technology and is there a positive or negative correlation.
While I was writing my literature review I noticed that most of the researchers
explained how social media affected college students but didn't really state
were there positive findings or negative. In my methods sections I proposed to
have students give up any use of social media sites and their cell phones for
three days and to write how they felt each of those three days. This was essential
in the whole research project because it would show the negative side affects
that technology has posed on society today and how much we depend on it. One of
the researchers explained how we were too dependent on technology today but was
more focused on the psychological affect of it (Klein). I also performed a
focus group after the experiment that proved both to be surprising and
enlightening in the research project. In the discussion section I mention that the students realize how dependent
they are on their phones and social media to function in their everyday life.
Some realized that they could live without their phone and decided to put it
down for a while and focus on school and family, rather than " staring at
videos on Vine or going through Twitter to find drama." It was nice that
my research had a positive affect on the students and it brought more meaning
into my research paper as a whole because of the honesty I received from the
journals, surveys, and interview.
I
felt overall I have grown as a writer and thinker of the world through this
course during the semester and have pushed myself to limits that I never
thought possible. I can make an argument and have the evidence to back it up. I
feel that though I might not have related to all the courses outcomes I have
related to the ones that most reflected my writing.
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