I think the thing I’ve learned the most about was not why things are good, but rather how to do good things. Anyone can say that recycling is good, that corporations need to be regulated and that waste should be reduced, but the practical aspect is what really matters. Take the attention mapping project which gave me insight on how much I use my phone and made me realize “wow I should really be using less of this.” Or the eco hacks project, in which I initially gathered info for the project to forget about then slowly found myself actually practicing what I was preaching, the Commons project which led me to start using more commons based websites such as Wikipedia and Github. Actually putting what was being taught into use in real life was something I both didn’t expect from this class, and something I didn’t think I would do in general. This extends to class discussion as well. I’ll admit I was a bit of a cynic about a few things that seemed like wishful thinking and best case scenarios only to break it down and realize that there’s a lot of doable solutions to these problems. Like in our most recent discussion I had a part about production, at first I wasn’t really trying to answer, after all the world needs a constant production cycle at it’s current rate to support its industry, altering that causes big problems. The goal was to make more with less, and I didn’t see a way to make more. Then I thought about it some more, the graph was a line with production at the start and disposal and the end, but why did it need to be a line? Our table talked about it, and we started seriously discussing how to integrate disposal into production in ways that both worked morally and logically.
And I think this is the hallmark of a good class, being able to use and apply things that you’ve learned in class to real situations means that the class will be remembered. I won’t forget what I’ve learned in this class because it’s useful while being tied into what I should expect to learn from the class. And that’s not all the class taught me, while I did have some experience editing slides and so forth I’ve never used Canva for projects nor arcgis ever so learning 2 new programs was great, and Canva is something I’ll use down the line for sure.
