final course reflection

Well.. this is it. This is the end of my very first course with Dr. Yuen and I must say I greatly enjoyed the experience. This was a very "hands-on" class which incorporated the content into everything that that was utilized. The telecommunications aspect of the class was seen in all of the projects, discussions, and even in the place where the class was hosted.

The class was hosted within a Social Networking Site called Mixxt.  I have mixed feelings about the use of this site for an online class. I really enjoyed the opportunity to be able to subscribe to posts within the forums and I enjoyed the less formal feel of the site. It gave the impression of a more laid-back experience similar to Facebook or Myspace. I did not like the way everything was spread out within Mixxt. I was not a fan of having navigate through many pages in order to find information like having to go one place to get to resources (lecture notes, schedule, syllabus, etc.) and then navigate to an entirely different side of the site to get to the forums. I was also not a real big fan of the style of the forum. The forum application felt very clunky especially in the replies. I wished for a more sleek or collapsible post-reply-thread. That being said, the use of the social-networking site was very innovative and thought provoking and was a positive experience.

The real jewel of the class was the content.  This class covered many emerging issues and applications that are found within the field of Telecommunications.  I enjoyed this tremendously. My other classes have focused very heavily upon the theory and "Design" side of Instructional Technology and Design and left the technology side as kind of an extra for me to pursue if I wanted to. This course put the technology right up there with the theory and design in one big package. I tried my best in all the assignments to pour as much as I could into them from creating all the backgrounds and headers from scratch in the websites, to making the content of those sites useful for future teaching experiences. I enjoyed tweaking the html and troubleshooting the bugs across browsers for all of my sites. I am very proud of those sites as far as design, content, and compatibility across browsers. The social sites are going to prove themselves very useful in my educational pursuits. The only item that I did not feel had as much potential for use, though it does have some, is Eyejot. I described it in my discussion about the tool, but I just didn't feel that it had much instructional use other than novelty.

Creating these projects were a great joy to me and the discussions were actually beneficial for life outside of this class. :) I think that I am most excited about having this Blogfolio for me. I've always enjoyed journaling and looking back at where I've been. This blog will serve as a marker for me to look back at my presumptions, beliefs, and ideas about technology. This is only my 2nd year in this Ph.D. ITD program and already my ideas have been radically changed from even a year ago. My ideas for my dissertation, views about design/development, and many others are in  a constant state of flux. I look forward to opening this blog back up next year and the next and re-evaluating myself, seeing what a moron I was, and realizing the things that I was on to. This is a very exciting to me and I am very excited to have been a part of this experience.