I am an introverted extroverted person; I am more of an intuitive person and when it comes to decision making, I am more likely of a thinking person than an emotional person. I love perfecting the details of my life especially the things I get attached to like going to the gym and maintaining a healthy lifestyle and applying rationality to everything I do. I am an empathetic person in certain situation, but I think my experience in this course opened my eyes towards empathy from a different perspective.
Throughout my experience in this course I was able to grasp a lot of knowledge, skills and attitudes; of these was a skill that I will always use in my academic, social and career life, I should always have a minimum information about the background of the person I am talking with because there is no one single way to present a piece of information or knowledge to people as different people come from different backgrounds with different cultures and experiences, so in order to have a fruitful communication I should find different ways to communicate with different people.
When it comes to empathy, I learned to not only empathize with people whom I deal with on daily basis and in certain situations, but I learned to empathize with different groups of people and empathize with their sufferings, for example: when shifting to online education I learned to not only focus on my personal problems and the fact that I might have a slow internet or the fact that the content is a little bit hard or that I might lose track a little bit because other people might have bigger problems like: not having internet at all, no having personal laptop or not even having an environment at home that supports online conferences and focusing.
The course was eye opening to the fact that I should not be biased and that I don’t just have to think about myself, instead I should put myself in other people’s shoes and be more thoughtful and empathize with others and with their cases, giving them fair and equal chances. The in-class activities, articles and the Ted Talks helped me a lot in understanding these ideas. One of the articles was the othering “http://unboundeq.creativitycourse.org/activities/othering-belonging-annotation-via-hypothes_is/”: talking about how groups discriminate other groups calling them the others, feeling they are superior to the others, which is a behavior that might lead to violence. Another source was the Ted Talk video “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXuJ8yQf6dI&feature=youtu.be” about the search engine algorithms and how it is defective and should be less biased and adjusted to give fair and equal chance for different perceptions to show, for example rather than finding a picture of a beautiful girl when I search the word beautiful, I should also find pictures of the beautiful nature etc. and this shows how the search process doesn’t show everything with fair share due to the behavior of people.
I also learned that I shouldn’t believe everything I find on the internet and there are ways to search for credible news; going back to the Ted Talk about algorithm, I learned that I should be aware of the algorithm and how it works to be able to get credible information. Also, we had an in-class discussion about fake news and how we should trace the credibility or the fakeness of the source of a news.
If I were to show someone my learning in this course, I would show them Soliya reflection “https://omarmarakby.design.blog/2020/05/03/soliya-reflection/ “ as this online exchange program was a new experience for me, which I enjoyed a lot and I would do it again as the technology makes you live an enriching experience, of which you get exposed to different people from different countries and cultures. I would also show my work on Me and My biases “https://omarmarakby.design.blog/2020/03/10/me-and-my-biases/ “ and the process of self-criticizing and how it is important to understand yourself and be aware of your faults and try to improve from myself and strive to be a better person. And last but not least My digital literacies pathway “https://omarmarakby.design.blog/2020/05/10/my-digital-litracies-pathway/” , as it lit the bulb and made me see how social media became a daily ritual in our lives, we open our eyes to our mobile first thing without even thinking. The test also made me realize that I am confident and familiar with using technologies in general; when it comes to research and finding information, I am able to do that and use good searching tools. I might be good with the creative and innovative tools, but I don’t have an extensive knowledge with multimedia and editing tool and I don’t mind learning more. And lastly, I realized that the best way of learning is through combining different ways of learning to be able to grasp the whole experience.
I gained a lot of knowledge and experience self-traits from this course and I learned a lot about myself and about the digital world we’re living in. but, if I were to change anything about this course, I would’ve loved to take more outdoor classes if we were still on campus because I think it outdoor classes creates a more integrating and better environment, I would’ve wanted to have more talks with guest speakers, who have experience in the concepts of othering and discrimination and digital literacy, to gain more knowledge from them and since a huge part of the course was about different cultures and digital identities and digital literacies, I would have loved that one of the assignment was to get in touch in on campus with international students and help them out with assignments or to gather in an event and form discussions; something like that would’ve been a fruitful experience and last but not least, I would have loved to have a local field trip and get exposed to another cultures and also educate people about different digital tools and their usage.
Since this course added so much to my character and it was a valuable course, I think this course is for everyone as for sure it will somehow add something to every person, affect them, get them educated about digital literacy and let them add from their experience to others. I enjoyed a lot the in-class discussions unlike the Blog posts, It is not that it is not valuable, but since I am not a fan of writing or presenting my learning into writing, the Blog posts would not my first choice to present my learning, I’d rather reflect on my entire experience in the form of discussions with the doctor or a presentation with infographics, animations and voice over. However, I am still presenting my learning into writing because of time constraints.
Links:
Othering Article: http://unboundeq.creativitycourse.org/activities/othering-belonging-annotation-via-hypothes_is/
Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXuJ8yQf6dI&feature=youtu.be
My Learning
Soliya Reflection: https://omarmarakby.design.blog/2020/05/03/soliya-reflection/
Me and My Biases: https://omarmarakby.design.blog/2020/03/10/me-and-my-biases/ Digital Literacies: https://omarmarakby.design.blog/2020/05/10/my-digital-litracies-pathway/
Marakby's Blog 