The projects we worked on and discussions we had over the course of the semester helped to give me a new understanding of the AIDS epidemic and it’s societal and medical context. Medically, I did not realize that it took so long for a connection to be established between patients and for the disease to even be named. I was truly shocked by how little was known about the disease in the early years, and once I discovered more about the medical context it made me understand better how the disease was able to spread so rapidly. Socially, I knew coming into the class that AIDS victims had been treated poorly in the early years of the epidemic (and some still are to this day), but I need not realize the extent to which they were maltreated. I was also shocked when I learned how the medical community also discriminated against AIDS victims. I also learned many skills for doing academic research and finding reliable sources on the internet (oftentimes in the past I had been told by professors to use only printed sources and not even consider online ones), along with learning some extremely valuable new technologies and ways of integrating multimodality into my academic compositions.

My favorite technology that I used for the first time in class was without a doubt Zotero, which we were introduced to while making the annotated bibliographies. It serves as a way of saving sources found on the internet (offline works can also be inputted). It saves the source data and also automatically gleans all of the metadata. It also is capable of automatically creating and outputting a citation which is extremely useful. Before I’d always used Microsoft Word or Google Docs spreadsheets to keep track of my sources and then had to use a separate citation maker, and with Zotero all of this can be done with a few clicks of the button. It also has great organizational and collaborative features. It is truly a game changer and I am sure I will be utilizing it much more in the future.

Two other technologies that we utilized in class that were very useful were WordPress (which I have worked with before and love) and Knightlab timeline creation tool. The WordPress platform was great for the class blog, and it was great to have such a collaborative class experience through it. The blog posts were always thoughtful and provocative and provided for great discussion points. The timeline creation tool was also extremely useful and easy to use, and made extremely good, modern, and well-functioning timelines that can be easily embedded into other sites. I will definitely be utilizing it for future projects.

Along with the many technologies we learned about and utilized in class, the research I did for the different projects also helped me further develop my “crap detector” and hone my internet research skills. The annotated bibliography was especially helpful in this way, and was also the first time I had seriously utilized Google Scholar, which I plan to be using much more in the future. The class truly helped me with my understanding of both the AIDS epidemic, of which my view has been completely changed, and also how to conduct college-level academic research and incorporate multimodality into my compositions.

I hope you enjoy viewing my exhibits of the work we have done in this class. Please use the menu at the top-right or click here to view the exhibits page.

~Cody Bonvouloir