Proof-of-Learning #4

This last week is certainly a stressful one! Everyone is busy working on their final projects and trying to get everything submitted. Something I've really enjoyed about this class is the communication aspect of it. The discussion boards have given us the freedom to share our ideas and check out the perspectives of other students in our class. I think it is so cool that we have the ability to work as a team and let each other know what our research findings are. It's very likely that whatever each person has done for their project is something they are passionate about. At the very least they at least have some interest in it. I've enjoyed getting to see those interests come out and having the ability to give my fellow classmates my thoughts on their thoughts!

Something I found to be interesting this week was that some were posting questionnaires for their research projects. I really liked this because clearly their aim in doing this is to make their findings relevant to our individual community and age group. When they present their findings, they will be incorporating what they found through interviews and questionnaires with us. We had the unique opportunity to help one another out in this way, and I thought that was really special.

I have been very encouraged by other’s explicit interest in my project via the project topic forum, specifically the in the past couple of weeks. My project topic is something that is near to my heart because recently it has affected one of my closest friends. Not only am I excited about what I’ve been researching the past few weeks, but a few of my classmates shared their interest in what I was doing too. This helped me to feel connected with them even though we have never met in person before. Yet, interest in the Deaf community served as a uniting force.

I am such a play by the rules type of girl. If I’m honest, this whole class I’ve been freaking out. I’ve been amazed at the fast-paced but laidback feel of it. I’ve been impressed by how understanding and flexible the professor has been with technical issues and everything else. It’s driven me nuts not to have a set-in-stone rubric to know what is expected of me in terms of the final project. Honestly, I mean no disrespect. I’m the girl that gets excited to see her rubrics in the syllabus in the beginning of each semester and is thoroughly looking forward to tackling them as the semester progresses. I’ve finished research projects for other classes up to a month before they were due. Yep, I’m that kind of crazy. That being said though, this experience has been a very freeing one too. I get the feeling that we weren’t given a strict set of rules of what needed to be included in our projects because those can sometimes limit creativity drastically. I can definitely admit that this has been a learning experience that tested me but overall I’m thankful for.