Drawing the Semester to a Close: Reflections

As the semester draws to a close, I realize that creating and maintaining this blog has been a huge learning experience for me. It has taught me much more about myself and exposed me to so much information than I realized existed. When I chose my blog topic, it was my intention to shed light on where Ghana is in its technological adaptations and also to demonstrate how Africans in general always find unique ways of using technology to suit their unique needs. I gathered news information from different web sources such which are listed on the lower right of this blog page. I also got a lot of feed from twitter. The more African and international news sources I followed, the more headlines I was able to gather to report which helped me keep my blog content in high quality (in my opinion). I have gained a new appreciation for twitter because of this.
This class has been a very good learning experience. I am very glad that I took it. I have learned so much about trending technologies, how technology is changing the face of journalism and how the rate of adoption of new technology is reshaping everything from education to health to politics to fashion.
My favorite post would have to be the two posts regarding the use of Facebook by Africans and by Ghanaians. I think I loved this post the most because it was a compilation of research that I did myself. The statistics that I presented referring specifically to Ghana were gathered by my friend and me through a survey that I created. It confirmed one of the most important points presented throughout my blog. Mobile technology has penetrated Africa beyond grid electricity and land-line internet.
My least favorite post was that on the use of cell phones in the US which was a homework assignment for class. This is probably because the articles we had to read in order to respond to the topic involved a lot of data that was hard for me to synthesize.
I am ending with e-waste because I feel this is a topic that was not touched on in class. As an environmental science and technology major that grew up in Africa, this is a huge concern for me. A lot of emphasis in this class has been placed on what’s new and upcoming but no one has considered the effects of so much technology and hardware being produced. The only way to keep adopting new technology is to trash old ones, hence the big e-waste problem. Its killing the environment and causing poisoning to a lot of women and children in the developing world.
Overall, this has been an awesome experience. I do believe I will be blogging in the future.