This class is one of the only online classes I’ve had which really created a community online. However, I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t the best at keeping up with these communities. I don’t know how, but I only found our community discord halfway through the semester. I also enjoyed looking through and commenting on other peoples blogs when I could. I may not have been the most consistent blog reader and commenter, but being able to show a bit of support, ask questions, and give suggestions to my fellow classmates. I’ve found my biggest contributions have been resource sharing. My post discussing Diffit, the AI tool for teachers, I received comments from others discussing how they found it a really interesting tool that they were planning to try out for themselves.
I found myself being able to share a couple other tools in the discord community as well, like when recommending Photopea to use instead of photoshop. Though in retrospect, I guess I probably should have linked the website to make it easier to find and try out. However, I found some suggestions in the discord to be really interesting. People discussing where to find copyright free images, and even using Dall-e and other AI to create images from scratch for their post. Brian Duran Vinet showcases this pretty well in his blog, where I believe most of his images for his learning were AI generated (other than his own photos he took), and they look great.
When it comes to blogging in general, I found the feedback was always super informative. I never made a post in reaction to any particular comment, but hearing people be interested in learning about the extremely niche topic I was learning and sharing made me a bit more exited to make my posts more interesting. While I didn’t mention it, my post “Talking Like A Bartender” was inspired by comments from people who expressed how little they knew about drinks in general. These comments made me kind of reflect on the topic as a whole, and realize that even ordering a drink can be kind of scary if you don’t know what the terms really mean. Many of these comments also helped me learn a bit about how others put their posts together, which helped me with my own.
Comments from “Layering A Drink“
Comments From “Shaken or Stirred“
This class has been a great experience all around, both in what we’ve learned, and how we’ve manages to connect with and support each other in new ways we don’t usually think of.