Reflections Week 8-14

Wow, this semester just went by so fast for me. Although there was so much going on for me this semester I can so that I honestly learned quite a bit in this class. Reflecting now on what I have learned in this class has really got me thinking about everything that we talked about over this past semester. Doing all those activities for our advocacy projects I believe had the most impact on me.

JUNK

In the second half of the semester we talked quite a bit about junking, upcycling and various forms of recycling. We discussed via blogs and in class discussions on how to re-purpose items that you may consider as useless and garbage into something else that can be useful. My junk project was taking an old piece of ribbon, some beads off a necklace that broke and a random dragonfly charm that I found and making them into a reusable bookmark. Spending that time in class discussing recycling and junking along with our junk projects really got me thinking on ways I could recycle. It also helped just seeing what everyone else in class was re-purposing to give me ideas.

Advocacy Project

I really enjoyed the whole step by step process that we used in the advocacy project. Although I wasn't aware at the start that the topic we picked for the first blog post was going to be the one we had to use for the whole advocacy project otherwise I probably would have picked something else. This experience did teach me a lot though. Just thinking about it now, all the steps involved in advocating for something, not to mention just being aware of all the people involved. 

Share and Voice

The Share and Voice postings were fun in my opinion. This gave me the opportunity to talk about what I was interested in. Not only did this give me more freedom to do what I wanted but while searching for subjects to post on I ended up learning a lot which was really neat.  I would have to say that my favorite post in Share and Voice is my most recent one on the coral sea marine plan in Australia.

Photo Essay

The photo essay was a fun project to work on. Digging around at my parent's home I was able to find numerous items that had been re-purposed. I thought that this was a great way to get us thinking about recycling, junking and re-purposing items. I enjoy these types of assignments better than just writing about them. It got me actually thinking about it more and putting more of an effort into it

Conclusion

The semester as a whole went by fast, especially for this class. I can honestly say that I have taken a lot out of this class. All of the topics that we talked about in class were all practical and got me thinking about my impact on the environment. Overall, I really enjoyed this class.

Share and Voice: Australia to create world's largest marine reserve

For my last Share and Voice I decided to look up an article. I found an article on CNN.com that was called "Australia to create world's largest marine reserve."

The Australian government has made plans to establish the world's largest protected marine in the Coral Sea. I think that this is huge. You hear everyday how we are polluting our waters and how coral reefs around the world are gradually getting smaller and smaller. Something has to be done to preserve these reefs because they are home to such a vast array of different species and creatures. The diversity that you can find in an area like the Coral Sea and other coral reefs is like nothing you can find anywhere else. That's why I am 100% behind this plan to preserve it. We need to start protecting our environment otherwise we are going to end up with nothing.

This article was a bit short but I feel like it really got the point across that it wanted to. I was excited to see this because this shows that in some areas of the world there are people actually making an effort to protect and preserve the environment.