Friday, July 25, 2008

Overall course reflection — IT 648

I am working on my fourth degree, and this has been one of the best classes I have ever taken. Period.

I have learned about things I didn't even know existed, and the best part is that I am now curious about all these new technologies and excited about how I can incorporate them into my teaching and also into my personal life.

I will never be in charge of the Mass Comm computer labs at UCA, so what I needed to learn from this class was the output, and I have succeeded in that goal. I have learned something from every assignment, even the easiest one — Web Searching — I'm getting the new iPhone when I get home next week, and and I can't wait to visit the Mac Apps store and dive into all the free downloads on the Apple page that I discovered from that assignment! This is my debut into the world of blogging, and although I still have some reservations about blogging to excess (see my post of June 5, Blogfolio), I certainly can see how a blog can be useful. I have kept up with some hot news from home this summer mostly through the Arkansas Times' Arkansas blog.

Perhaps my favorite assignment was designing the Web site. This is because I never dreamed I could do something like this, so it was very empowering to me and seemed to set the stage for the summer. I embraced each new challenge/assignment and was thrilled when I accomplished it.

My strength, I feel, is my attitude toward the technology and my willingness — even eagerness — to continue to learn new things. I will be keeping up with Dr. Yuen's blog to stay on the cutting edge of this area.

My weakness, obviously, is the technical side (as I'm sure was obvious on the final!) As I said, I will never have to be in charge of any computers at UCA — I am lucky to have a number of colleagues more tech-savvy than I am — so the topologies and cabling issues won't be an issue for me. Although I have found this summer to be so much fun, I truthfully am not "wired" to be interested in or good at these kinds of mechanical things. I have, however, somehow soaked up a better understanding of the technical side (still not very much, I'm afraid.)

My future learning goals don't really include improving on that weakness — as I said, I have lots of colleagues far better than I am in those areas. But I certainly intend to continue learning the skills learned from this class and going beyond those as the Web evolves even further. As I head home for the 2008-2009 school year, I will be in contact with Dr. Yuen through his blog and with my classmates through the class listserv and hope to be able to continue to learn from all of them.

I hope to integrate everything I've learned in this class into my teaching. I will be teaching Advanced Reporting in the fall, and I can see using a blog and threaded discussions as we study politics, city, state and county government, etc. I will be creating a class Web site as well as linking my personal site to the UCA site. I'm not exactly sure yet how to incorporate the circaVie timeline — some of my lectures, such as politics, will have some historical background, such as Arkansas state government, so that would be a good option. When I am able to get access to the site manager for my WebQuest, I definitely want to use that. The Arkansas Gazette is the most important newspaper in the history of the state, and I want to keep that newspaper alive for future generations of Arkansas journalists (hence my film and my dissertation). As I've said, I will definitely use the Eyejot video messages in my personal life, but I will also try to figure a way to incorporate this learning into my journalism classes. Finally, I am committed to making better use of PowerPoint, and Slideshare will be a great option for doing this.

This class has changed my teaching forever!

1 comment:

TREKWEBMASTER said...

Dear Donna:

A fascinating subject, IT and how it relates to "modern media." What interesting bits of academia did you learn?

I think the "turning point" came for me, back when I was "striving" for my Associate in IT, was binary math and "making the bytes" count.

I really never understood how you could get a "1" in binary math until the instructor pointed out that any number to the 1st power was one, then it all made sense.

IT is a "different animal," but it's still all "ones" and "zeros," when you break it all down.

Tell me more...

Sincerely,

Trekwebmaster