77 Learning Reflections
Learning Reflection #1
Growing up, I often felt I didn’t fit in with the other girls in my class. By the age of 10, every girl on my fourth-grade soccer team knew how to do their hair in cute little updos with ribbons, while I had my mom or friend help me tie my long, thick, frizzy hair into a sad ponytail before practice. All I wanted was the ability to do it myself, but every time I tried, my hands cramped, and I ended up with something that nowhere resembled what I was attempting.
While my inability to do my hair was embarrassing, it wasn’t necessarily my fault. Unlike how a cub learns to hunt from its lion parents, my mom was never the best at braiding hair either, leaving me to complain about it being uneven or lumpy when she tried to help. And unlike a spider, I didn’t have instinctual knowledge on how to magically weave my hair into any style I wanted. After years of getting by without knowing how to do my own hair, I realized how impractical it was to rely on others any time I wanted to wear my hair any way but down. So one day, I sat myself down on my bedroom floor, opened a YouTube tutorial, and forced myself to try and get it just right. It was through trial and error I finally learned how to braid my own hair. While this may seem like a trivial accomplishment, I was proud of myself for figuring it out. Since learning, I’ve gotten better through practice and I hope I can work may way up to a french or dutch braid one day.
Learning Reflection #2
According to the Harvard Business Review, active listening is defined as “when you not only hear what someone is saying but also attune to their thoughts and feelings. It turns a conversation into an active, non-competitive, two-way interaction” (Gallo). When we were first introduced to the challenge of active listening, I thought to myself, this should be easy; I listen all the time! However, as I tried to practice this in my day-to-day life, I became increasingly aware of my tendency to interrupt others. This bad habit isn’t because I don’t have an interest in the conversation, but rather, if I don’t make my witty remarks as someone is talking to me, I will completely zone out and miss this conversation.
While I tried to practice active listening multiple times, I really focused on it during my weekly video call with my best friend. She was retelling the events of her week while I sat there trying to keep track of all the people and places I didn’t know in her stories about her week. Not interrupting her to clarify pieces of information was challenging, but I found she was able to get through her whole story without losing her train of thought due to my interruptions. I also found that if I just let her talk, I don’t even need to ask clarifying questions because she will answer them as the story goes on.
Even though this assignment is over, I’ve continued to try to practice active listening and take notice when I am interrupting others instead of listening to what they have to say. While I’m not perfect at it, I feel myself getting better at letting others entirely speak their ideas before I interject.
Citations:
Gallo, A. (2024, April 5). What is active listening?. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2024/01/what-is-active-listening
Learning Reflection #3
Before this class, I had never heard of visual thinking strategies (VTS), but I have unknowingly gone through the process. My high school emphasized learning through the inquiry method, which meant observing and asking questions. We would practice this by looking at art pieces (like the one from class) and only writing down what we see. Once we did this, we would take our observations and form our interpretations of the information presented. We would then write down what we wondered or wanted to know more about. I currently understand VTS to be a similar process of absorbing information before analyzing it. Going through this process in class and then at the MERF made me realize the importance of slowing down to really see everything before reacting. It’s because of this pause I was able to see things like how the color of the walls blended in perfectly with all the windows of the MERF. I really appreciate this process and will definitely be using it to calm my brain whenever I am overwhelmed.
Learning Reflection #4
This semester, I have learned many ways AI can be used as a tool to support my learning, as well as the ways it can lead me astray. One of my favorite ways to use AI is summarizing articles. I often have a difficult time comprehending long articles with a dense amount of information, so having a tool like Google’s Notebook LM lay out the key concepts for me is incredibly helpful. I especially appreciate the chat feature that allows me to ask deeper questions about the content of an article that I don’t completely understand or may not have been included in the initial summary. For example, in my research on Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) for my Synthesis project, I am interested in designing an intervention that will help college students experiencing this condition. Using Notebook LM, I was able to find which articles talk about how exercise is related to the symptoms of SAD and how it can be used to lessen these symptoms. This has saved me so much time and has allowed me to focus on the aspects that are actually important to my project instead of sifting through irrelevant information.
Even though Notebook LM has been a tremendous help with my Synthesis project, there are other ways AI usage has been misguided. For example, my platform for chemistry homework has an AI tutor option for when we get a problem wrong. It functions as a chatbot and guides you toward the correct answer as you converse with it. However, there have been multiple occasions where we will be chatting, and it tells me my thinking is correct, but when I put my answer in, I am entirely wrong. I then tried to confront the AI tool and ask why it told me I had the right answer when I didn’t and it would deny everything. Sometimes, I get so angry at the AI tutor, but then I have to take a step back and remember that I am literally arguing with a robot, which is inherently embarrassing.
Learning Reflection #5
In this course, we explored the multiple ways art can aid the healing process and, in some cases, be a better remedy than medication. The example I keep thinking back to is the little girl with sickle cell who felt more relief from dancing than the pain medication she was on. This introduced me to the idea that sometimes you just need to accept that something works even if you don’t understand how or why. In the little girl’s case, her doctor wrote a note on her file saying that “dancing works better than medication.” This doctor didn’t necessarily know why it was helping, but he saw that it was relieving his patient, and that was all that mattered.
In this course, we also learned about AI and how it can benefit our learning. Before this semester, I believed that AI should never be used in an academic context since I had only seen people use it to write their essays for them. I now know that there are many other AI platforms besides ChatGPT that can be used to strengthen learning rather than hinder it. My favorite of the ones we explored was Google’s NotebookLM. I found that this tool helped me spend less time looking for content in an article and allowed me to spend more time analyzing that content. I’ve learned that AI shouldn’t be something I’m scared of; instead, it should be something that makes my work stronger (if my teacher permits it).
