Virtual Microbe!

Assalamualaikum and hai! It's been a while right hehe. So as usual, I am going to rant about our assignments here. This time, it is allllll about virtual microbe! The name of the assignment is already interesting. Because we are literally discussing about microbes virtually. Heheh, 

So as third year student, we discussed about virus as we are learning Virology for this semester. Virus is definitely one interesting creature but also veryyyyy complex. Only one process (well actually step) example like translation or transcription, so many things need to be remembered. Because the one step involves maaannyyyyy step. 

For this assignment, we collaborate with UKM students. I am truly grateful that they make a good team with us! We have a lot of sharing session with them as we kinda expose them with all these apps that Dr Wan taught us (Thank you Dr!). Video discussion is quite fun I guess but if only the internet connection is strongggg. The most challenging part is of course trying to get stable network that enable us to record our discussion smoothly. But yea, it's not that easy. Oh we are using Zoom btw.

Even though, this assignment's topic is on Virus, but we learn a lot more than Virus. This kind of task is not the same as those kinds that we do in classes. Because this requires responsibility and hardwork. It is not easy to have everyone from different places to sit in front of the laptop and discuss about virus. Well basically to discuss on any kind of thing. 

Despite all other things that we need to do, we managed to make this task becomes reality. 

The idea of this assignment is very good because it has the sense of innovation here. But after completing at least two video discussions, I honestly think that we are not ready yet, or I am not ready to collaborate with international students from international universities. There are so many things need to be improved. Especially network. Trying to get the network only can turn our mood off.

Next is time zone. Working with people in the same time zone is hard enough as each person have their own schedule. Working with different time zone is definitely harder.

Other than that, language. It is so much different discussing things virtually compared to discussing it offline, in real life, face to face. With so many different slang, accents, it is not going to be easy. 

Even when us just among ourselves, we still need to use Bahasa Melayu a little bit in order to understand, or maybe I can say to facilitate our discussion.  

To me, doing something new is not only about completing it. It is also about measuring how much we accomplish it. And it is completely fine to fail for the first time. We can stay at level 1 and take time trying to improve, making so many attempts before proceeding to level 2. And from the first attempt, we need to take corrective action, before simply proceeding to level 2. 

So I guess that's all from me. Thank you Dr Wan for giving us the opportunity to try and learn something new. 

Bye! 

REFLECTIVE JOURNAL!

1.       1.  The learning outcome is the ecology of microbes had been known. We get to know the types of ecology involve such as soil, water, and atmosphere. The involvement of microbes in our surrounding and daily life can be identified more deeply. If we expose to other people who don’t really have microbiology background, it is going to be quite shocking for them to know that we live with microbes and depend on microbes in so many way.

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   2. What have I learned from microbial ecology is the involvement of microbes in our environment. How the interaction actually works two ways. The microbes use the ecology as their source of nutrient which enable them to grow and survive while the ecology gets the benefit from the microbes. But there are also microbes which give negative effect. Learning microbial ecology, makes me realize that not only things that can be seen with our naked eyes are crucial in maintaining the balance in our environment, but also the things that can’t be seen by our naked eyes. In fact, some of them actually contribute quite a big part in our ecology.

3.  3.  The experience from Microbe and Us project that me and my groupmates get is we learnt how to produce a documentary video and also article. Even though before this we had produced a few video, but this documentary video is not really the same. It was different in content and also we included narration. For the article, it was a very new experience as we never write any article before. We also made an interview with one of our lecturer, Prof Shuhaimi. The interview was smooth because Prof Shu was very cooperative and he gave us the informations we needed as well as new information. It was fun working with people who has wide knowledge but never hesitate to share their knowledge.

4. Microbial ecology can be related to most of the subject we already took earlier semester. This is because, as we are taking microbiology course, for sure the focus is on microorganism. Learning all these ecology is related to its morphology, characteristic, the function and many more. The knowledge gained from this subject can be used in the next semester especially when we are going to do our final year project. It is important to know about the microbes and where to isolate them. Without knowing where to isolate them, and also the source of nutrient, how can we grow the microbes for our final year project.