I really enjoyed the course I felt that it was something new and refreshing for the semester and I gained a lot of knowledge in this class l. For example the fake news assignment and the video about trump was really something I did not know that people could do. I learned how to think critically and I think I will use this in the future hopefully, I feel that the way I think is changed these days. I learned to also listen more to what other people have to say because sometimes what other people have to say is very interesting. I would show my friends and family the game I created and the blogpost that was about the conference at the beginning of the semester because everyone was there was actually different and had different experiences during this conference. I think that the people that should take this course are people that want something different and enjoyable they will also have to think critically. In the end it was the best course I took this semester and I hope that many other courses can adapt like this one can. We learned when the university was open and we found away to still do that during the pandemic, all I hope is for the university to adapt like this course can just so they can learn and not just stay at home doing nothing. Thank you for the semester.

Slack: This was my first time ever using slack and it was better than i expected. I enjoyed the conversations we shared on there and the funny memes. The concept of different channels for different topics was honestly mesmerizing because you know exactly what you will be talking about in that channel. I think that there was an option to create a private channel which is like maybe for a small group of friends to share personal stuff. What I did not enjoy though is only getting a notification if someone used the @channel because I may have missed some conversations because i did not check slack frequently.

Google Forms: My project was on Google Forms and I really enjoyed how simple it was to use and the layout was also lovely and easy. You can create a lot of different things on Google forms and the option to add pictures to certain sections just gels with whole concept of Google Forms. Sometimes it was a bit frustrating when the paths of the game got intertwined but it was still very helpful for an amateur like myself.

Zoom: This was also my first time using zoom and it went better than expected. All classes were taught clearly and I rarely had a problem with the connection. The ability to share your screen is massively helpful because it allows the instructor to show you how to exactly do things and you can also see stuff from their perspective. I can see the limitations be something like privacy and also if someone does not have god quality internet it will be very hard to use zoom. There was a privacy scare worldwide on zoom but then they added password protection to each room to counter these issues and in my opinion it has worked so far.

Hypothesis.is: I never heard about this website before coming into this class, this is what we used to annotate some articles. So what I really liked about this website is the ability to annotate the articles with thousands of people. Everyone has a mind of his own and that is what you see when you use this website you can see the point of view of everyone from around the world which is extremely fascinating if you think about it and if that is not your thing you can create a group and invite the people you want and you will still be able to see each others annotation and you can reply to each other and have a conversation. I liked using this website but my only problem with this was that sometimes the controls got a bit clunky and I couldn’t respond to what other people had to say but overall it was an enjoyable experience.

Blackboard: This is what we use for all of our courses and everything is posted on blackboard ranging from course content to exam grades. Assignments are also posted here and they tell you when they are due and after marking the assignment you can view your grade on there. After anything is posted you will get an alert on your email which is supposed to be a good thing because you immediately know if something gets posted but in my experience I actually think blackboard gives me anxiety because of the due dates and the grades that I am expecting. Another limitation is that blackboard is not very useful on your smartphone and literally everyone nowadays has been immersed into their phones. Technically this is a good website to use but I do not like it because of the anxiety it causes for me and my colleagues.

Presentation skills module:

What are the importance of presentation skills? The short answer: having good presentation skills in life is really important! Knowing how to improve communication skills, whether you are in the classroom or the workplace, is something you will be thankful for when you have to share your ideas with an audience. I really enjoyed this module in particular because I learned instantly what to do. To summarize these are the four most useful things I have learned from the module.

If you command presence you will always be confident when you deliver the presentation and finding your personal style also plays a huge part in being confident when presenting because you have that style down and it is not going to change and you already know that this style has worked before and it should work again. Knowing your content seems obvious but some people just know the content that is in the presentation. You should be familiar with all the underlying topics and ideas in your presentation because if you get asked a question that you don’t know the answer to you will probably lose your credibility. The use of visual aids is also important as is also getting your message out clearly.

Smartphone module:

I though I knew everything about smartphones but it turns out that there is a lot of things I did not know and i just learned from this module. First of all i did not know that when i wear gloves or something that covers my hands or fingers the touch screen does not work because the screen need electrical contact with my finger that was actually new to me. The second thing that was astonishing is that bluetooth was actually named after a nordic king. I learned more about the OLED screens and the processor, turns out that our phones are just mini computers.

Even though I did not attend all of the soliya sessions I actually enjoyed it a lot and I learned a lot. First of all cross cultural communication is a complex process. In soliya we have learned that all cultures interpret things differently. Whether it is how to react when someone is late to a meeting or in how people perceive the influence of history on culture. 

That is one of the privileges of being a part of this program because we experience cross cultural communication first hand. With the program being so diverse it really adds to the experience. Communication between people of different cultures does not have to be difficult but it is also not always easy. An example of this is during the discussions when people from two different cultures disagree about something because of their cultures. Their options are to talk through their disagreement and explain themselves or to get defensive and argue. Luckily people in our section were willing to take the time to explain themselves but that is not always the case.
So far I believe we have learned the most about cross cultural communication by practicing with each other, which in my opinion is the best way to learn anything because of globalization. The importance of learning to communicate with different cultures is extremely relevant. I think this program and the exercises that we did during it helped everyone learn to communicate better not only cross culturally but within their own cultures as well.

I also attended the well being conversation and I liked how diverse the group was and it was actually uplifting to see that everyone is trying really hard to overcome the obstacles that they have even though the times are hard and everyone is struggling with the pandemic.

After submitting our first draft and receiving feedback, here the points we changed and modified. First, some of the scenarios in the during part were deleted or not saved, for reasons we don’t know-how. Surely, we didn’t remember the ones that got deleted, so we came up with new scenarios for that.  Not only that, but some of the questions in the during section were also too easy or straightforward, so we worked on changing what we can, as the others we haven’t found other relevant answers. Our main goal was to raise awareness through a game, rather than challenging people because sometimes we know the right actions but it just happens that we forget or neglect them.

We felt we were constrained by time, but if we had more time we could’ve done further research and added more scenarios. We would have also liked to include some statistical facts. We thought of doing short interviews with our friends, but again time wasn’t on our side.

We learned a lot about the Covid 19 pandemic in depth, we also learned about the tough decisions some people have to make in their day to day lives. We also learned how to make a digital narrative game we did not think it was this simple and finally and most importantly we learned that Covid 19 is no laughing matter and we have to take it very seriously.

To play our game click here.

Thank you we hope you enjoy the game!

Here are the links to the pictures we used:

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

Picture 4

Picture 5

Picture 6

This aims at discussing and raising awareness about the Coronavirus. As there are too many dark sides to this virus, but it also made us think differently and see how the world around us changed dramatically, where air pollution levels decreased and wildlife and animals are breathing once again for a long time. So, yes its a tragedy and many would ask how would such a pandemic virus be somehow beneficial, but as we mentioned above it spotlights on issues we used to neglect. In this game, you’ll be introduced to some questions and scenarios during quarantine and after the quarantine and we will see if anyone has actually learned anything during this tough time and what do we do if it happens again? Lets find out! Click here to play

We have witnessed what did Coronavirus do to humanity from those who died from, to those who got infected and finally the rest who are locked up in their houses. Many people are looking at the dark side of this situation and observing the bad events happening outside. However, I believe most people are turning a blind eye on the bright side as well. Many would ask how would be there any benefit of this tragedy, yes there are many. For instance, everyone wishes just to get back to his normal life and work without complaints or laze, so most of us now value our normal life activities and wish to get back to it. This would make us be thankful to what we have in our hands and get back to work with more passion and enthusiasm. Not only that, because of the quarantines and travel restrictions the earth is blessed with a significant decline in air pollution for the first time for so many years. I don’t know why wouldn’t we take action towards problems we caused to our own environment, and why should we wait for something to happen to spotlight the critical problem. For example, researchers claim that carbon dioxide level has decreased dramatically the past month causing many benefits such as melting of the poles nearly stopped and the disappearance of global warming. We conclude only one thing that we as humans are weak to protect our planet, instead nature itself had to stop us from corrupting Earth by taking serious actions towards us. Furthermore, one of the lesser-known benefits is how people are dealing with mental health now. Most companies nowadays try to know how their employees are coping with this pandemic and are helping out a lot with these mental health situations.  Also a decrease in pollution means that nature can grow again and it will not be harmed. In our opinion, a huge benefit of this pandemic is that we will not take anything for granted and that it is important to get out of the house more often and we should seize the opportunities we get in our limited time on earth. We believe that there will be a change in work ethic for everyone and hopefully we can get through this together.

Sources:

1. www.cnbc.com/2020/03/21/air-pollution-falls-as-coronavirus-slows-travel-but-it-forms-a-new-threat.html.
2. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-has-encouraged-companies-to-add-mental-health-benefits-2020-3
3. https://www.france24.com/en/20200320-clearer-water-cleaner-air-the-environmental-effects-of-coronavirus

First of all I would like to say that this is a first for me and I have never had an online class before this semester and I am hoping this will be fun. In the beginning the module talks about very basic stuff that you should have on your laptop like a browser, Microsoft Office and so on which I think most people have but there is something that I did not know about and I found it very helpful. It says that we should perform health checks on our laptops and honestly I never had the idea to check if everything is running smoothly as it should.

Secondly, what I found interesting are the roles of the teachers in online learning. In most classes I feel that there is not enough support for the students as the professors are not changing anything in their courses to support us and they just flood us with assignments like we have nothing else to do. In my opinion, there should be a balance in online instruction like we should still get assignments but we should also have enough time to do the same for other courses and that is what I like about my digital identity literacy class it is perfectly balanced as everything should be.

I know this is a hard time for both students and faculty but we can not get through this tough time if we do not support each other. We need to help each other out by anyway possible. For example, Professors should decrease the workload a bit but on the other hand students should not slack off and they have to study and engage in classes and prove that they understand the material to the professors. All I am saying is that someday we will hopefully look back on these days and we will either be happy with the outcome or extremely disappointed, we should make the best of this opportunity and have no regrets.

First of all the games I played where:

1. Spent
2. BBC Syrian Refugees
3. Sleep Deprived Mom game
4. Street Sweeper
5. Being Under The Influence
6. Responsible Partying

Both the Spent game and the BBC game were very eye opening because they put me in situations i though i would never be in. They were also very realistic and I really enjoyed playing them especially spent because I now think about the hard decisions that poor people have to make on a daily basis. My recommendation for both Spent and the BBC game is to give the players more options because sometimes its like they are sticking you into a corner and poking you with a stick. The BBC game should also improve its graphics because it is very unflattering. While I played the sleep deprived mom game I wanted to see if raising a child is as hard as it looks and it certainly is. Many of my decisions were incorrect even though I thought I had everything under control especially the question about if my child has a fever and she is sleeping it was a tricky question. I really enjoyed the game but my issue with it is that there should be more variety because I think that the options to choose from did not cover everything that I could do in these certain situations. My recommendation for this game is to expand some of the options and maybe add a few questions. I enjoyed the street sweeper game but I think it is black or white and there is no grey area in the options. The game is sort of like the spent game but it is tailored to Egypt. All of the previously mentioned games involve making hard decisions and my recommendation for the street sweeper game is to also drastically improve graphics and also increase the number of questions used. Finally, the Being Under the Influence Game and the Responsible drinking game are similar but the responsible drinking game is designed better. On the other hand the Under the Influence game puts drugs into perspective and this is an issue that teens deal with in day to day life. They are both semi realistic but it was fun being a Freshman in high school again. I really enjoyed this assignment because it put a twist on things that we could encounter some day and it taught empathy towards people struggling with these issues.

I am Abdullah Hani Ismail, an Egyptian- Canadian that lives in Cairo. Even though I was born in Egypt I have strong roots in Canada as a lot of my family lives there. First of all being raised by two people that lives most of their lives outside of Egypt (Dad – Switzerland, Mom – Canada) certainly came to my benefit, as I believe that they planted both Egyptian values and foreign values. Some of my friends believe that I am the least Egyptian of them just because I have two passports and what I try to explain is that I was born and raised in Cairo and the color of my passport is not who I am. I would like to think that I am more Egyptian than I am Canadian because this is the country that I lived in most of my life. It is like the video we saw in class on Trevor Noah he said that he is not trying to take away their “Frenchness” and he stated people could be dual citizens. When I go to visit Canada I am immediately an Egyptian even though I have the passport. When I speak they tend to say that I have an accent and some people are even surprised that I speak English even though I know that the education I had in school is better that what they had. Trying to explain to them what an international school is, is always a hassle because they don’t believe that our first language in school is actually English.  I realized that the biases that occur to me on a daily basis is my friends not recognizing that we are the same amount of Egyptian even though we have different passports. I also learned that my identity is who I am to myself because no one knows the whole me except for me and that is why identity is an intriguing topic. The first quiz I tried was the Race quiz and according to the quiz my responses suggested a moderate automatic preference for European Americans over African Americans. When I found this out I was quite surprised as I though I was neutral about the Race topic but I felt that there might have been a slight difficulty when the good and the African Americans were paired up together. I honestly don’t know if it was me or if the quiz tricked me by changing the keys but hopefully I am not biased towards any race. The second quiz I took was the Career and Gender quiz and according to the quiz my responses suggested a slight automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family. Honestly I thought that this particular quiz would have a different result. I thought I would have a strong automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family because my mom has been a stay at home mom for as long as I can remember while my dad was always at work. When I think about my biases I might actually have a couple of them. First of all I have a tendency to remember my choices, decisions, and advice as better than they actually were. I don’t know why I do this maybe its because of my ego. Secondly I think that those future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. I have always had this problem because it makes the person think too much into things.