Week 12 Blog #3: How My Personal Skills Improved Through Collaborative Learning

I've learned a lot of qualitative and quantitative knowledge through this course about patent litigation and the issues present within our current system, but one thing I wanted to note was how some of my more intrinsic, personal skills improved through both our class discussions and homework. There are as follows.

1. Communication
I never posted a YouTube recording of myself before and certainly never made a recording for something that was academic related on my YouTube account. One of the things this course taught me was effectively using social media, and specifically the video functions of it, to communicate to an audience outside of the traditional pen and paper. My first videos were filled with long pauses, moments of silence as I tried to think of what to say next, and general frustration on my end on how to make the perfect video. Through the critique of my peers, I learned that no video was ever going to be perfect in the sense of perfection that I sought, but the most important thing was to clearly convey my thoughts and opinions to my peers so that they would at least understand my material. I would write my blog posts before I made my videos and would attempt to summarize these posts prior to recording, which eased my transition to recording myself. Rather than read a long post that anyone could simply open up on my blog, I decided to intersperse separate thoughts, opinions, and questions in my videos to keep my audience engaged. And most importantly, I learned to shorten my videos and maintain them in a concise manner so my audience had a definitive understanding of the topic that I was presenting. The video aspect of this class played a major role in improving my communication skills.

2. Writing
Blogs are not your traditional essay formats. Frankly, the way I saw it, blogs could feature any format that was most comfortable for you. But what I sought to do in my blogs were to really go in-depth and attempt to present my information in a clear and logistical manner. Initially my blog posts would feature generic statements not really backed up with too much substance, but as the semester progressed, I noticed how my blog posts would feature more details whether it be facts around a certain case, quantitative trends that caught my eye that I could throw into a post, or just going more in-depth in explaining why I felt a certain way about an issue relating to patent litigation. The blogs were a good informal setting for me to improve my writing skills in a way that I could better communicate heavy amounts of information in a manner that was clear to my audience and was different from the traditional norm we are accustomed to in academia.

3. Participation
I normally sit in the front of most of my classes, but I rarely ever participate because I'm typically frightened by the prospect of blurting our the wrong answer or because participation doesn't have any sort of impact on my grade. Seeing the importance of participation in this class initially for my grade really got me to raise my hand as often as I could in the semester, but I see my learning experience was also enhanced by this. Yes, in many cases my analysis would typically be faulty or incomplete, but I felt that I was consistently corrected and I actually understood the material better through making these mistakes through thinking out loud. By the end of the semester, I was more eager to participate and did so because although in many cases, I didn't know whether my logic was correct, by putting it out there, I could see how I analyzed certain issues correctly and where I could improve my overall line of thinking and I think this emphasis on participation for this class really demonstrated to me the importance of participation not just for the learning experience of the class, but for myself personally.