Learning Essay

This class was a surpringly fun course for one that entailed so much work. Each individual project had a very large amount of work associated with it and was exceedingly time consuming, yet all in all was very enjoyable to do. This class allowed me to learn about new aspects of the internet that I never thought I would. For instance, I can honestly say that I would likely have never gone on Second Life and would have never had some of the "eye opening" encounters that I did, had it not been for this class.

When it came to Dreamweaver, I had never used the program before and to be honest I was quite nervous because I was afrain that it would be difficult to use. However, I usually work better when I learn on my own, and thus I opted not to go to a technology training session and just kind of mess around with the program until I discovered new things. I had fun just clicking buttons and seeing what they did. I still do not know exactly what "spry" is, but I know I used it on one of my pages because it did something cool. I also played a lot with the format of my websites until I found one that I really liked. I believe I did find out some quality aspects of the program and tried to use them as much as I could on my website.

When it came to choosing topics for my website, for both the Personal Hypertext and the Critical Hyperessay, I wanted to do something fun for two reasons. First, I knew I was going to be spending a lot of time working on them and I did not want to devote that much time to a boring and drab topic. Secondly I am graduating (tomorrow!) and I wanted to enjoy the projects that I would be working on in my final quarter here at SCU Undergrad. I'll still be here next year, in law school, but for this last quarter I wanted to have a good time. Thus I chose my favorite TV show "Lost" to not only make a website about featuring my own theories, but to also write an actual essay about it as a TV show in history. These two site's were a lot of work, but as I expected and hoped, a lot of fun.

The other program's that I had to use which I had never used before were "Snapz Pro X" and iMovie. Once again, I was a bit nervous going into this project for two reasons, one my lack of experience, and two, the fact that I had to learn with a group of four other people who I barely knew. But once more all of my feares were put aside. Other than the obvious technical issues that we had had (everything that we had edited being lost due to stupid library computer settings) I had a lot of fun. My group was amazing and I learned how to use the programs relatively quickly. The fact that we spent 26 hours in the library over four days was actually great because now I feel like I have new friends that I would not have had if it were not for this project. I have actually hung out with them outside of class on multiple occasions, at the pool or for lunch.

This class not only was a great amount of fun (what other class allows you to watch episodes of your favorite TV show and consider it homework?) it also helped me to learn a few new programs that I will most likely use in the future. I even would really like to keep my website online, so chances are I will pay that fee in order to get my site online because I have truly enjoyed it and want to share it with others.

My Critical Hyperessay turned out as follows: The printable version was 3,360 words. The website was 3,900 words. I also have four flash movies, including my own mashup of "Lost" mistakes and a few scenes from the show, and other shows as well. It turned out to be 16 pages and has a blog element as well.