User:Aesshaw26/sandbox/Abigail Shaw's Transformative Project Report

Transformative Works Report

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading 5 Wikipedia articles a day.

Pages Read
All of the pages I've read were logged in an excel spreadsheet, featuring the date they were read, my level of familiarity with the topic prior to reading the page, title of the page, why I picked it, and one interesting or random fact I learned from it.

Method
Each day, I would start by reading an article right away when I woke up. This helped me jumpstart the day with a little bit of learning, helping me to wake up and get my brain going before even getting out of bed. This was one of the most beneficial aspects of the project, as I noticed a drastic difference in my ability to retain information in my earliest class. After noticing this, I looked into it a bit further, I found a significant amount of research that links reading early in the morning to increased cognitive and memory function.

Aside from reading in the morning, I went straight to the Wikipedia app anytime I would normally be checking social media. Whenever I opened twitter, instagram or snapchat, I would close them out and go to wikipedia and read an article. This served the dual purpose of getting me to read and learn, while also unplugging in a less severe way than just deleting social media. This helped me prioritize my time, since I knew I had to read 5 articles a day and wouldn't have as much time for social media.

The process for finding pages changed slightly from day to day. Some days, I would reach the five early based on conversations I had or things I read/heard in the new or class. Other days, it was a challenge to find enough articles to hit the 5. Those days, I would rely heavily on the Wikipedia Randomizer feature, available both online and in the app. This would give me a random article to read.

Each night I would "debrief" by filling out the spreadsheet with all of my info. This also helped my retention, because it forced me to remember the information all day. Even now, I could list off random facts from pages I read without a second thought. After researching this a bit further, I found several journal articles that link night time reflection to retention of information.

Challenges
The largest challenge over the entire process was choosing 5 unique pages each day. There were several days were I would read well over 5 pages, but they would all be connected. I wanted to choose pages that had nothing to do with each other, to avoid simply falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole.

One of the weird challenges, was recording all of the pages. When I started the project, I downloaded the Wikipedia app. After a day I realized it was recording my search and reading history and thought score. I wouldn't have to record all of my history until the end of the project, when I uploaded it all to the excel sheet. Step in challenge number 2, when I went to start making the spreadsheet and realized that all of the info was saved, but only for the past 50 articles. You see, Wikipedia doesn't have unlimited History storage space and neglected to tell me that. This took an extreme amount of time to find all the links for the pages and I ended up giving up.

Going Forward
I thoroughly enjoyed doing this project. It was an amazing experience and a great excuse to learn random things each day. Moving forward, I think I'll try to read at least one Wikipedia page a day. While 5 was a good short term experience, it's a lot to do everyday. Minimum of one a day seems like a good compromise, and way to keep my brain engaged. I'll definitely keep jumpstarting my day by reading, although it may not always be a Wikipedia page. I think that reading a news article, or newsletter such as the New York Times Morning Briefing, would help me achieve a similar effect.

I would also like to implement replacing social media time with a chance for learning. I think this helped me subliminally change my mindset and priorities around learning. I've noticed that I'm more willing to choose homework and school things over fun in my downtime, which is important for learning. It has also helped me refocus on why I am here and what's most important right now.