History, Concepts
I would like to start my reflections by remembering where this all started. At the beginning of the semester, in our tout-premier blog post, I said that I was interested in finding traceable patterns throughout history (that blog post here). I think that this has ended up being a major theme throughout the whole semester. The first themes I think we noticed were these ideas of our digital concepts--they are all much more fleshed out today than ever before in the past, and yet none of these concepts is truly novel. Societies throughout history have tried varying levels of participation, control, openness, etc.; therein lies the human drama and the almost constant upheaval of various human governments and societies. We also found other examples of themes on our own, besides the ones suggested to us by our professors; 'revolutions' comes to mind.
I started the semester in my beloved twentieth century group, and made the following relevant blog posts:
- this one on historical publishing
- this one on book-learning
- this fun collection of pictures
- and this more recent post on the history of 'free'
I was also in a participation group, and read the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (see here, as well as a conversation or two on my google+ page). I also felt like this reflective post about the class was directly related to participation. Stephen Lottermoser and I had some great conversations about participation via google hangout towards the beginning of the semester, especially when we talked about the sudoku-experiment attempted by one of the other content groups. And one of my personal favorites was the discussion of crowdsourcing on Stephen's post, which was sparked by my own blog post about chess crowdsourcing.
Digital Literacy and Collaboration
Another interesting segment of our class was trying to predict what trends and themes we will see in the future. I don't know if this was one of the stated intentions of the course, but our semi-motto, "Consume, create, connect," is in my opinion nothing less than a prediction of the future of online and digital media. "Everyone" is blogging, and those who aren't are going to start soon. (Even my mom wants me to help her set up a blog while I'm home over the summer!) That's exactly what we have all been doing all through the semester. This class has started a lot of conversations with roommates, friends, new acquaintances; digiciv has started creeping up in my conversations. That whole process is what we do every time we write a 'substantial', researched blog post with sources and valid arguments, and it leads directly to connecting as we find people who are interested in the same things we are discussing.
Probably the best example for all of us in all three of the C's was our event. We have been consuming all semester, we had the chance to connect while looking for social proof and invitees, and finally we got to create en masse last week. I helped Jen Joslin and Jase Adams by preparing the p2p (posterboard-to-powerpoint) slides that they used, as well as helping them develop their ideas and organize them into a cohesive whole. Technical difficulties and frayed nerves and all, it was a great event that really reached out to a lot of people. I enjoyed participating, both moving slides and tweeting.
And, of course, there was the book. Collaboration, participation, and all of the three C's at their finest. It was a great idea, and despite falling a little short, I think it was a valuable experience for all of us. We all learned lessons about working together and setting our own deadlines and coming together as groups that will be useful to us, regardless of when and how the book gets published
Self-Directed Learning
Really, it's hard to point to one example of self-directed learning. There were so many conversations on Google+, so many discussions with people in and outside of class. These below especially stood out.
here,
here and above,
and finally here.
In reality, though, every substantial blog post I made was at some level based on self-directed learning, with maybe one exception.
Miscellaneous and Closing
Finally, a few more things that didn't fit in other sections, like the great conversation we had here about fighting racism and causing social change. I also have very much appreciated in these last two semesters how Professor Burton has encouraged us to think our own thoughts and not let the system define how we interact and communicate and learn, as I expressed here.
This has been a learning experience, and I'm glad that I took this class. My general education has definitely been enriched by learning about the things that we've been discussing, and I look forward to finding new, creative ways to network and participate in both the immediate and more distant future.
I'm excited to see where we go next!
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