At the beginning of the researching Africa in the 21st century course I did not see the purpose of the course directly. After the first few weeks passed by I started to realize that my mind set was slowly changing. The idea of doing research differently then the typical way dawned on me. Some things seemed to be too far-fetched but after completing the tasks you realize you look differently at certain aspects of your research. A good example was the lecture on logo-making for your research. In the first instance I was kind of sceptical but thinking about the logo let me also think differently on my own research.
In that same class we also spoke about data scraping and searching for certain topics on websites. It was a very brief and technical part of the class which, if you really want to use it, needs quite a bit of practice and attention. I tried several of the tools and in my opinion hackastory is a quite easy tool which I may would use in the future.
The 10th class on the 19th of November everyone had the opportunity to explain their internship plans ant related research topics. It is quite interesting to see the different fields of interests of my peers. I was amazed again by the variety of everyone’s ideas. The second part of the class was focussed on the voice 4 thought website and publishing house. To my knowledge a pioneering website in the area of renewed publishing which in my point of view shows courage in the often conservative academic world.
Hopefully the last couple of weeks can help us prepare further for the field work which to me is the toughest hurdle to overcome.