Week 2 reflection

1. I read the article “Why Birds Matter” this week and I read the response of my classmates. Even though I have some different opinions regarding the purpose of the article, but I still learnt a lot from this article. First, I learned what is “multimedia essay” means and I learned many multimedia aspects, such as using images and links, which can help the audience to better understand the concepts or arguments of the essay. Also, by reading my classmates’ responses about “Why Birds Matter”, I gathered many interesting ideas about this article that I did not notice when I was reading the article. I enjoyed learning different ideas from my classmates.

2. Safina’s Trumpets of Elephant is a great work that helps me to learn more about elephants. It also gives me some hints on how to do my own research for this class. For example, there are some scientific keywords that I can research on for my own research, such as elephant cognition, elephant emotion and etc. Actually, I can search about cognition, emotion, and other scientific terms not necessarily of elephants but of other animals, such as dolphins, as well. Moreover, Safina includes many of his own experiences in the article, and I am thinking that perhaps I could possibly include some of my own experiences in my research paper.

3. I did not decide the topic of my research yet, but I have a general direction of what I want to do. I probably will choose bees as the animal that I do research on, and for my research, I could focus on cognition, intelligence, and communication of bees. I am considering working on bees now because I followed an organization on Twitter and find its tweets interesting. I will do more research on bees to see if this topic suits me or not.