My Final Reflection
My experience throughout Learning with Digital Stories at CU Denver has been one of both confusion and understanding. When we first began the course I was not sure how to navigate and plant myself. Unlike my previous experiences, the format of Learning with Digital Stories was not based on a LMS or Learning Management System. Without this center of information I was confused as to how and where I was going to find and produce content. I’ll be honest, when Remi told us our course would be taken place throughout various platforms I was less than thrilled. Throughout my experience in the ILT program I have been so familiarized in using a LMS like Canvas or Blackboard. However, after my experience I have come to better understand the intentions behind the class format and why it is important to constantly move myself from one platform to another rather than just “planting myself” in one.
As a learner in this course, I was pushed outside of my comfort zone to practice a new style of learning. Instead of being focused on one center of information, we were pushed to understand that information can be found and produced in many different places. As our work throughout the ILT program is to promote the use of technology in learning environments it is important to recognize that technology and how we use different technologies often changes. By shifting our platforms we are finding and adapting to new potentials of different technologies. What I found most interesting in my social learning experience was the idea behind the importance of creation. We are often taught knowledge through consumption, however at times we are not asked to produce our own variations of what we consumed. Throughout the course, production was encouraged and allowed the students to express their own meaning in the work they were doing.
My co-design of this course was placed through my interactions with my peers using blogs and Twitter. Being different from my previous experiences in my graduate work, with no center of information, contact with my peers took place throughout various platforms. Using Twitter we were able to easily share our work and connect our work with DS 106 and our blogs. Our responsibilities to each other was to connect our work to our class and then to provide each other critique for improvement. Throughout my experience, I would have enjoyed opening more options for platforms such as Google+ and Facebook. As I was contemplating my experience I do not think blogs were my personal favorite. I would have enjoyed creating my own page or Google group where I could invite others to join, share work, and form my own affinity space.
My understanding of pedagogy has changed throughout my experience in Learning with Digital Stories. We are often given material to study and then we are tested upon that material. However, we are often not given the chance to express our work through our own creations. Throughout this course I was not worried about papers or exams, but I was more worried what I was going to make. Instead of being forced to memorize, we were pushed to think. Each week we were asked to produce anything we liked that fit accordingly to a theme and present our work. This experience was different for me as it gave me the opportunity to choose how I wanted to learn and how I wanted to express what I was learning. If I were to give any recommendations for this course in the future, I would just recommend expanding on the work that is already being done. Overall, the course was a wonderful experience but I would like to note that there are so many different social media outlets that I would have wondered how the experience would have been if we were given even more platforms. My experience throughout the course has taught me that information can be produced anywhere and the only way for our work to evolve is by being shared with others to seek improvement.
