Reflection

The past few months I have learned many different things in this class. I'd like to talk about the three different aspects to the class and what I have learned in each aspect.

Historical Context: I absolutely love history. I love learning new things and I love this class especially because it allows me to learn new things in my own way. We are given guided reading to help stimulate the topic, then we are allowed to explore the topic for ourselves, using our own methods (Google search, library, blogs, etc). I have been able to learn a lot more (and focus more on the aspects of each subject that I personally find more interesting). I'm even doing a better job at documenting what I'm reading through diigo.

Computing Concepts and Digital Culture: While I still seem to struggle in this regard, I think I've made bounding leaps of improvement since the beginning months of the semester. I've really begin to embrace the skills I've learned, and it's helped me not only in this class, but in almost all my other classes I've used the concepts I've learned here. For example in my Theater midterm I used Jing to help put my PowerPoint presentation together. I also created a Prezi presentation for my Political Science course. It's been fun to teach these things to my friends and family (they think I'm a lot more tech savvy than they used to). I'm also not afraid to search things out for myself. Before this class I was very closed minded to the technological/digital world. I was afraid to use anything more than Firefox and only searched through Google. However, now I am more willing to try to discover things on my own, and ask other people who know more about these things. It's been exciting to learn new tricks.

Self-Directed Learning: I think this was quite a challenge to me at the beginning of the semester, but I think I have come a long way since then. As I mentioned earlier, I have gotten better at using Diigo to show some of the things I've been researching. It's been very interesting to see how much legitimate information is actually on the internet. I think, especially in high school, teachers and professors are always talking about the evils of using internet information to study, but the more i have searched online for different topics, the more I have found that there is very good and legitimate resources to use. The great hing is that they are free and available to the masses. It's a shame not many people know about it though. I have really enjoyed learning how to discover information on my own, and to read and investigate topics that I find personally interesting. It's very liberating from my other courses I've taken which give specific reading assignments.

I think overall, I have greatly increased my knowledge of western civilization, computer/digital concepts, and self-directed learning. I'm still trying to find ways to better myself, but I think I've come a long way and have learned many important lessons that will help open my understanding to these ideas in the future.