Learning Essay

I must say when I was through with the first day of class, I was more than a little worried about the amount of work that was presented to be finished this quarter.  Never before had I been presented with the challenge of creating so many unique projects using tools I had previously not been introduced to.  However, I found through the course of the quarter I was growing and adapting to this new technology and I really began to enjoy what I was doing.

Creating Hypertext has allowed me to expand on my writing skills.  I had to approach hypertext from a different angle than any other writing style I have ever been taught.  This was difficult for me to do.  My first hypertext project on marijuana law was written almost entirely in one sitting in a fairly linear fashion.  I sat down and decided what I wanted to present, instead of allowing it to flow.  However, by the time I was finished revising my website for it, I began to understand the theory and experience of hypertext.  My second project on technology in education, therefore, came about in a much more flowing manner.  While I still wrote it all in one sitting, I really came in with few preconceptions of what I was going to write.  I had sources I knew would be useful and I really allowed myself to flow out of that to create pieces of writing I wanted to present on my site. This greatly influenced how I worked on my final site.  Beyond my topic, I really did not know exactly how my site would be modeled, but once I began writing it all began to flow and take shape nicely.  At first I had a hard time seeing the benefit of hypertext composition, being so fully indoctrinated by the ways of factory schooling, but now I see some benefits, both intellectually and technically.

As far as the technical aspects of the actual writing, I found the review of literature to be the most helpful.  I have done an annotated bibliography for other classes, but never before was I forced to think about how that all went together.  However, the review of literature allowed me to find themes and strings throughout the material, and also to see what was missing that I could contribute.  Then the process of converting between hypertext and linear allowed me to find weak spots in my writing.  Going from hypertext to linear showed me where I needed to add more detail to make everything more understandable, and I was then able to go back and fix that in the hypertext.  As well, that process helped me find where I needed to make breaks in the writing that also naturally fit into the hypertext.  It basically gave me multiple steps for forced revision, something I often leave to the wayside.  I really tried to use critical thinking with the definition "the art of thinking about your thinking while you are thinking in order to make your thinking better: more clear, more accurate, or more defensible."  At every step I was looking at what I was doing and trying to make it better and stronger, which is what I was ultimately looking for our of a third writing class.

I have never felt myself to be very civically engaged.  I vote and I try to participate when I can, but it has been hard for me to find an issue I believe in strongly enough that I try to influence other people.  Because of this, I was worried about the final project (although looking back I realize my first project was fairly engaged).  However, through my meetings with Marc, I was able to realize that civic engagement does not have to mean a major issue; it just means taking something that has meaning for you personally and finding a way to change that for the better.  In that regard, I am trying to follow along with what Juris has to say about horizontal expansion.  I want to find common interests, goals and values and express them in a way that will inspire people to change their ideas about beer and brewing. 

In a way it is hard to disregard either the founder of slow food or its chief proponent in the US.  “I always say a gastronome who isn’t an environmentalist is just stupid, and I say an environmentalist who isn’t a gastronome is just sad,” he said through an interpreter in an interview last year.   In this regard, the educated consumer knows what he or she has to do in regards to the human condition (at least in the United States). 

With regards to the wiki and forum, I found them helpful to a point.  A lot of time with the forum I would see people saying essentially the same thing, and I would also fall into the same trap because it just became so monotonous to read everything.  However, there were times where I found it very engaging to interact and answer questions posed by my fellow students within a thread created by Marc.

I have had to create a website for a class before, but it was purely informational.  We created a site to teach people how to use a particular website within the chemistry department.  It was useful in the sense that it gave us basic web design skills and looked good on a resume, but I really have a hard time seeing a lot of my classes benefiting from creating a website. 

My site comprises fifty-two web pages, averaging three internal links per page, plus a navigation bar of five standard links. There are twenty external links on the site. It includes 7,752 words of my own writing, plus a 2,228-word printable research essay based on part of my site and a 3,027 word printable research essay based on another portion, and two annotated bibliographies, both containing 8 items.