Blog 12: Reflection

Superlative 1: Most informative - Blog post 11

I chose this because Complete delete gave me a lot of background information on how technology works when I press delete. It was helpful to think about how my own technology works when I press delete and how I might feel if something was kept longer than I wanted or never truly deleted.

Superlative 2: Most shocking - Blog post 6

This blog post analyzed a case study that talked about a lot of issues with AI companions, which I did not think were that big of a deal. People are trying to use them as a replacement for human interactions and they can cause a lot of harms by pushing people to dangerous mental states and things like self harm. It was shocking to read about how AI companions can easily give very harmful and incorrect information, and feed in to someone’s bad ideas.

Blog Evolution: Blog post 3

This blog post required me to understand how to write blog posts a lot better. At first I was writing them as very much question - answer and I had to understand how to relate the readings to my own life and talk about my experiences, as well as make the questions flow into my writing.

Writing Skills and Growth:

My writing skills have improved through writing blog posts by helping me write better transitions when I am switching between different questions or topics. I also felt like I was able to elaborate better on my writing and specify what I mean better. This could be further explaining what I mean, or also explaining context better.

Process Comparison:

I would not have preferred essays over blog posts. Writing for an online audience is different because it is helpful to think about how we write so that everyone can understand, whereas essay writing can easily fit into a specific context where only the teacher would be able to read your writing properly.

Patterns and Habits:

A big writing habit I have is to just be straightforward with an answer, and not elaborate or write much else. I also like to just list the question and put my answer to it without formatting the blog post at all. This habit did change after revising old blogs, and helped me change how I wrote about the case study.

Topics and Themes:

I enjoyed talking about how models are trained and machine learning, because it gave me a good idea of how models work and how you can try to be more ethical when data training. I liked lectures and group discussions at our tables because it allowed for a low-key conversation about concepts and relating them to our own lives and experiences.

Knowledge integration:

Writing the blogs definitely did help me understand the topic more. I had some moments where writing my own discussion question or answering the discussion questions from the case study made me connect things to my own life and understand it from a social view and not an educational strict definition view.

Future use of website:

I might post projects or alter the website to be more focused on things I have done. This would be a good platform for me to post things and use on a resume. I don’t think I will keep up with the blogs, unless I find something super interesting that I think I would want to share my thoughts on.

Future writing identity:

I want to work more on reflective writing because I think I don’t reflect as much on things as I wish I did. It’s hard for me to reflect on a process and not give a simple approach to it. This would help me in other classes as well as evaluating myself on skills.

Personal writing goal:

A personal goal I have for my writing is to start writing and have too much, and then having to condense it. I feel like I am always having to lengthen my writing and add more nonsense to reach a good level or word requirement. It is definitely an important skill that people practice by doing things like journaling, which is something I could start doing. This would help me just get everything on the page, and then look through it to edit and format it.