Learning Essay

This class taught me how to incorporate technology into my English major.  Perhaps the most valuable skill was the ability to make a website from scratch.  I definitely feel much more confident with Dreamweaver, iMovie, and Second Life.  I feel as though over the three hypertexts, the sophistication of my site design really increased.  However, I do feel as though moving the hypertext to a linear version was not only difficult, but also fairly useless. 

My first hypertext was fairly plain.  I mostly worked on become familiar with the Dreamweaver program.  This personal hypertext could definitely be rework to become my main website for my dance aerobics career.  My second hypertext was more involved in its design elements.  I tried to play with color, tables, and fonts.  However, the writing in this hypertext was not to the level that I really wanted.  I think in this project, I was extremely concerned with playing around with the looks of the site and paid less attention to the quality of writing.

My final hypertext on Parkinson’s is the website I am most proud of.  It is 15 interlinked pages composed of 4,200 original words.  My video in this project consisted of an interview with my mom on how her life has changed since my dad was diagnosed with the disease in 2006.  Interspersed throughout the video are video clips of them walking together, including a close up comparison of my mom’s normal walking compared to my dad’s affected walking. 

The reading and forum posting in this class was my least favorite element, excluding the machinima movie.  Though I see how the readings pertained to the topic of “technology”, this is an upper-division English class and I felt as though the readings did not pertain enough to the actual element of the English language, minus a few of the readings we did on hypertext reading.  Posting in the forums was convenient but I found it hard to really follow any progression of discussion in the forums.  As opposed to the growth that conversations have in class, the forum discussions seemed to be one-way conversations between the poster and the professor.  I felt like this really inhibited a quality discussion of the readings. 

The machinima project, in the end, seemed to be a waste of time to me.  Though it did familiarize me with the Second Life program, I do not see how this skill will greatly help me in the future.  Though I can see why making a shorter movie in the program would make sense to help kids understand what Second Life is, the size and time spent on the movie seemed to be fairly invaluable and, in the end, did not hold much weight in my grade.  Ironically, that is the project I spent the most time on.

Overall, I feel as though this class has made me more confident in my abilities to use the website design programs.  This may come in handy for me in my future teaching career.  Other than this skill, I feel as though the class mostly reinforced many things I already learned at SCU.  In conclusion, an enjoyable class, but I feel I gained skills more than knowledge.