I am working with technology, I am writing and reading text. What one takes from this course could be as simple as that. However, with a little bit of motivation and inspiration, an entire new perspective can appear that opens up a myriad of possibilities for the learning experience. This class can be tailored towards communication majors, english majors, science majors, math majors, computer science majors, education majors, business majors, and pretty much anything else you can think of because literature and technology are all-encompassing. The information presented in the course gathers material from each and every one of these areas and if utilized correctly, can be a great asset to a career. These are just the beginning tools and it is what we make of them that will determine our grade, of course, but also the knowledge gained. My high school’s motto was always “we learn not for school but for life.” Call the mice police because that may have been a bit too cheesy but I honestly think that this course has given me more tools to apply in my future endeavors. I have added skills in several new technologies to my repertoire and have also learned new and creative ways to dig into texts to find meaning, something that can apply to many areas of life.
I appreciated this class more than I have appreciated any other of my gen-ed courses. I came into it as a senior and surprisingly have found a lack of senior-itis as I finish up my project because I am enjoying the process and I like manipulating the technology to discover (and help others discover) the objects I focused on. I have very much enjoyed this class over the course of the semester.
Johanna, I’d agree that your high school’s motto is bit on the cheesy side, but I also find it to be truthful. Looking back to some of the longer readings in this class we may have felt like we were unsure about their purpose, but ultimately each assignment had an object and forced us to look at something, new or old, in a different way. Down the road, these analytic skills will prove to be very useful in our careers and even in our lives as a whole. The class, as a whole, teaches us to analyze, organize, and publish our work which is fundamental to a solid education.
I like that Jeff said the class teaches us how to publish our work. I hadn’t given that much thought until I saw the comment. The likes of TEI, HTML and Omeka have given us the basic tools to publish online for free in most cases. I only wish that this aspect of the course was valued more by the rest of the faculty and administrators so that we as “well-rounded” liberal arts graduates could have a means to voice our opinions and research in an “unconventional way”. Although, I believe that digital publications will eventually become the norm. In an ideal world, I could see a lower-level gen ed on DH (broad subject matter) and then a upper-level course on online drafting/publishing that would focus on one or two methods of publication and/or coding.