To reflect on learning is to revisit the growth and realizations you have made on a topic. This may mean showing that you have acquired new knowledge, acknowledging that you have changed your mind about something, or mention new questions that have arisen through your learning. Below are my reflections on learning from this course.

 Before this class, I believed that artificial intelligence (AI) was mainly used when students wanted to cheat on writing assignments. However, through exercises that we have done in class, such as using AI to compare a biomedical and fictional source about the same illness, I have realized that there is more to using AI. When using AI in writing and learning there are several factors that must be considered, the first being when AI is beneficial. In certain circumstances, AI can be used to broaden knowledge on general topics and include details about sources such as books and movies without having to read them entirely. However, there are limits to AI, that must also be considered. These include the fact that AI cannot interpret what the audience wants to hear, does not consider including information that will be more emotionally moving, and oftentimes, fails to sound human in writing style. This makes me wonder, can you prompt AI to consider your audience? Can you prompt AI to appeal to certain human emotions? I don’t entirely know the answer to these questions yet. You can certainly try. While my overall impression of AI has changed, I now maintain that,  AI, while useful, should remain as only a part of research and writing, and must be used responsibly. It is important that people learn about how to use AI effectively because it is now part of society, how we live, and how we learn.

I used active listening with my roommate, with my cousin over FaceTime, and with a new girl I met at a club meeting. My roommate was telling me about her classes, my cousin was telling me about going to church, and the girl I met at my club meeting was telling me about her roommate. In all three situations, I think that the people I listened to felt validated. I could tell because they all wanted to continue speaking with me. Obviously, with the girl I was meeting for the first time, she was unable to notice anything different about my listening style, but she did ask for my contact information at the end of our meeting. Both my roommate and cousin didn’t share with me an observation about my listening being different, but they knew that I was truly paying attention to what they were saying. The conversations all went very smoothly. For me, the most challenging part about being an active listener is not getting distracted by what is happening around me. I am typically a very observant person and so I often am thinking about what I’m seeing as opposed to what I’m hearing. It was also difficult for me to not think in advance about what to respond with and to truly listen in the moment.

 When we compare social and biomedical science with the humanities, the two are very different despite both playing large roles in patient care and treatment. Social and biomedical sciences examine things through a quantitative lens. They gather their information and background based on surveys, experiments, interviews and demographic data. On the other hand, humanities acquire this knowledge through film, literature, poetry, visual art, performance, and discussion. These two areas also have different goals and characteristics. Social and biomedical sciences aim for objectivity and produce generalizable knowledge. Their goal is to explain, predict, and control so that they can intervene to solve problems. Those in humanities want to capture and represent the richness of human experience and advocate for others through empathy and understanding. Their goal is to give voice to every human, and they pay special care to preserving history.

When we compare health and medical humanities, it is obvious that health is a more encompassing term. Medical humanities originated when questions of moral ethics began to arise in treating patients as a result of technological advances. Now, there is a new movement to change the term in education to health humanities as to acknowledge that there are more dimensions to health than medicine. We now know that to truly understand a patient and their health we must look at the social factors that influence their life. Examples of these factors include sex, gender, income, religion, geographic location, and race. All of these identities relate to a person’s health and healing.