Week 6 Reflection

Part 1: Building Blocks to Build Expertise

I would say that the most useful activity for me was the annotations we completed in weeks 1 and 2 of the various scicomm articles from TIME. The information was interesting, but it also made me pay closer attention to the details that I should be noticing when doing my research for the scicomm article, such as names of researchers and the different fields they work in. Another helpful activity was the Bird Brain documentary and annotation assignment - it was a refreshing break from all of the reading and gave me a sense of how the research experiments actually work by seeing them play out on the screen. Finally, I also enjoyed doing the "Creating A Coherent Paragraph" Practice Session from McGraw Hill. Unlike the close reading practices, this was a fun activity and allowed me to more deeply analyse the structure and inner workings of an article or essay.

Part 2: Meeting Minimum Requirements on LR Draft

I am somewhat, but not fully, confident that my draft meets all of the minimum requirements. I think I did a good job with developing the Works Cited section and body paragraphs. There is somewhat of a sense that the essay is aligned with a central controlling thesis (wolves are intelligent being that should be studied more). I was a little confused by the Source Requirements, because the orginal assignment instructions said to only talk about three research article but the rubric is now demanding six different sources. I'm also a bit nervous about the "scholarly ethos" section, since the language I used isn't very complex and the descriptions provided are kind of basic, although the tone is very objective.

Part 3: Social Media Campaign Planning

The issue I'm going to focus on is wolf hunting as a way of combating livestock being eaten as prey, because I remember finding a research article from Slovenia saying that this intervention doesn't work, and is an unnecessarily violent means of addressing the problem. I could also focus on habitat loss, though I'm not sure if this really a pressing issue for the species or not. The organisations I plan to include are the Animal Liberation Front and the Human Society since I already follow both of them on X and they seem to advocate a lot for wildlife conservation. I might also look into the Animal Welfare Institute since I know they've done work with wolves (my chosen species).