Final Reflection

Self-Directed Learning / Personal Blog Post

I remember that at the beginning of the semester I thought I would be interested in Remix. But looking back on some of my posts I've seen that I was more interested in collaboration. Even my group's project reflected this (Menagerie). I think the most interesting thing to me was collaboration and art (particularly music) and how Web 2.0 affects this process. I wrote about one of my most exciting realizations in a post called "Confessions and Crowdsourcing." I think that I tried to apply the idea of collaboration and crowdsourcing to the Menagerie project, especially because I spent a good amount of time asking people around me what they thought of the project and asking them to contribute.

I think that I also took an interest in how digital culture affected connections, particularly with people who don't care to connect. I got a lot of ideas from a post that Sarah Talley made on Google + and then a short sharing with Greg Williams on a post that I made about introverts and the internet.

 

One aspect of digital culture that I spent some time thinking about but never made a post on, is the idea of digital culture being an island for our "real world" culture. Reading Lord of the Flies really helped me to think about this, as did considering the parallels between that novel and the TV series Lost. Deserted islands don't have a lot of connections to the outside world. They don't have strict social or governmental laws. They are a great wilderness, just waiting to be discovered. The entire digital culture can be seen in a similar way. And in a way, it can get pretty lonely on the island of the internet. But interestingly enough, people use it to connect to others and make it a real world. I found this website, support.webofloneliness.com, particularly interesting in those regards.

Collaboration

While we were still developing Menagerie, we all had a lot of great ideas. I feel like I helped, with the rest of the group, to develop these ideas into a solid project proposal. In the early stages of Menagerie we each had a very specific role that we were supposed to play. I was the primary member of the marketing team but was to also contribute to the editing/submissions team. However, we found that marketing was something that needed to come a little more naturally and wasn't something that we would have the time or means to force and emphasize. So I did what I could with that by posting on Facebook, talking to classmates, and generally trying to get the word out about it. I spent much more time trying to help develop our website, especially after we had our feedback session. My most solid contribution was the submission form. We needed a way to get our submissions in a unified format so I helped to solve that problem.

I feel like I did more to contribute to other groups' projects in their early stages. I was really interested in the LBP project as it started out. It was amazing to see the very visible progress that they were making. I also enjoyed testing out one of the preliminary badges for one of the badges groups.

Others' assistance

At the beginning of the course it was easy to fall behind the other class members who were very active on Google + and just follow their lead. I found posts by Tara Pina and Gwendolyn Hammer interesting and remember one particular conversation we had about girls in the gaming world. Throughout the course I would have to say that my fellow group members were most influential because they were the people that I was really looking for when I went onto Google +. Shelby had a lot of interesting and entertaining posts, including one that she did about her sister. I was always interested to see what Tasha Watts was going to post and her post that sparked the inspiration for Menagerie was one of my favorites.

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Digital Literacy

In this class not only have I learned about different tools to utilize to enhance the way that I consume, particularly regarding the digital world, I have also discovered better ways to create and connect. I think that my groups' project, Menagerie, really helped solidify these concepts in my mind. We really wanted to create a site where you could do all three - consume, create, and connect. By establishing Menagerie I was able to see the creation and collaboration process in action. It was also really interesting to see the ways that connections can be made because of small connections with people via Google + or Twitter or a blog. I have become more aware of what I consume online and what I'm giving to the digital world. There are a lot of ways to create and connect and I feel like I'm just starting to scratch the surface of those discoveries.