LE Reflection Blog

 Today, we were introduced to a number of journalists on Twitter who report facts and things they see when they go to other countries. This was interesting to know because I was also curious about how Mr. Paterson gets his information. After that, we were introduced to the 5 fingers of summarizing and what we need to have in our news article. It is my first time writing an article on a topic and I thought these factors would help improve the interestingness of the articles. Unlike other essays, I have written throughout my life, the audience is wider and versatile so I thought it was important to make the writing clean, short, and engaging. 

 In today's class, we started by looking at some examples of websites done by students from a few years ago. It was interesting to see the different kinds of topics and genres they chose and the way they approached their idea especially because I noticed that a lot of the topics were chosen according to the relative events of the time. As said in class, because they used the old version of Google sites, it was a little rough on the design side which I would like to work on.  We then got back into our groups to work on the website. Mr. Paterson gave us some tips for how we should do our websites and other advice that would make it better. For example, unifying the color theme would give more of a professional look. Another tip was to use the bio we made at the start of the semester as a way to introduce ourselves. These were things that the students from a few years ago weren't able to do. It was difficult to choose what to pick for our websites as they have to be somewhat link...

 In this day's class, we started by clarifying the definition of bias. During our lessons on the media, we often use the word bias as a way to chastise media manipulation, but as we used this word, it started to drift into a different meaning which was false and misguiding in a way. I would like to be more careful on how I use vocabulary going on, as I try to use new and challenging words on these blogs as a way to improve my English.  After the short introduction, we were broken into groups of 4 to talk about the document we made on how we would teach a class of university students on the topics we were taught. Some things other members in my group stated was that they would do things in a sort of routine in order to get used to what they will do in each class. This would allow for students to be prepared for the next class as they would somewhat already know what they are going to do. Notwithstanding, I disagreed with this idea because I thought that this routine would make ...

 Today, we first talked about deceptive word phrasing that makes people think of different things than reality. For example, a separation barrier or security fence, when it obviously more of a wall than a fence. These kinds of deception make it seems as the problem is not as bad as it thinks which lessens support from the people outside.    Most of today's class was used to watch a documentary by John Pilger who made two movies about the Israel Palestine problem. When we do these classes, we often watch it with the whole class and Mr. Paterson stops it for a discussion, but today, we were broken into smaller groups to pause freely and talk when we want to. The movie we watched was called "Palestine is Still the Issue" and follows John Pilger on a report to Israel.  When watching the movie, one thing I felt was that unlike the news articles we read in class, the damage and violence we saw were not done by bombs and missiles but more by the Israeli people against the P...

 In today's class, we were split into two groups to research more news relating to Israel and Palestine. One-half of the class was assigned to focus on mainstream new companies such as The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times, and Harratz, while the other half focused on other news sources such as social media. We then discussed our findings to compare the difference in coverage depending on how mainstream it is.  I was shocked by the clear difference in how they see and portray the difference in media. For example, on social media, my partner found how news on a woman who was trying to kill herself was shot by a soldier because they said that the woman was trying to stab the police. The news itself was not covered by the companies that I searched up, but when I searched for this article, I found something that was more devastating. On the social media news, it said that the woman was trying to kill herself for some reason, but on the news article, they stated the soldier's vie...

The reason we write blogs after each class is to reflect upon what we have learned and as a place to share our opinions about our learnings, but this requires that we take in the correct information and note it down for the reflection blog. The class started with Mr. Paterson telling us about the hokum that happened on a blog post from a few weeks ago where a student misremembered certain facts about the ostracism experience. This lead him to believe that we weren't capable of taking correct notes so he used the fact that half of the class missed a lecture to test how accurately we took our notes. Mr. Paterson broke us into 3 groups with a few people who attended the class and others who didn't to allow the students who knew the lesson to reteach the class. Though I took on this challenge with alacrity, there were few members in my group who felt discontent, which made me a little worried if I'll be able to understand the explanation. This was what I got from the explanatio...