Thursday, April 24, 2008

Final Post

1. What has most surprised you when investigating the topic of digital literacy?

One of the most surprising things to me when investigating the topic of digital literacy is that digital literacy has begun to affect almost every part of our daily lives. I think about our 'my news' bubble that we talked about and even though we have access to the most information that we've ever been privy too, we can actually cocoon ourselves in our own little news world. I don't think I realized when I started this course that digital literacy was as big of a part of my life as it is.

2. What has been the most challenging part of this course (and by challenging, I don't mean that you didn't like it, I mean to ask what challenged your previously held notions or beliefs--what made you reconsider something you thought you understood previously.)

The most challenging part of this course was dealing with the idea that my digital literacy is not as high as I would have thought. This isn't an egotistical statement to make me sound like I know everything there is to know about computers, because I don't. But I was confident that I knew a good bit about computers. Given there would be some programs such as iMovie that I had never used before and thus would have to learn, but even knowing this I was astonished at how much I didn't know. This course has made me reconsider how digitally literate I thought I was. But this isn't a bad thing and by no means did the course make me feel unintelligent, rather it made me want to know more. Thus I am compelled to increase my digitally literacy daily.

3. What has been your proudest accomplishment? What do you know now that you didn't know before? What can you do now that you couldn't before?

My proudest accomplishment has most definitely been my growing knowledge of iMovie. Before this class I had never used iMovie before although I had heard about it and knew it could do some pretty amazing stuff [or at least stuff I had never done before.] I now know how to use iMovie in a literate way including being able to troubleshoot by myself as opposed to having to ask for help every step of the way. The questions that I had to ask in order to create my final project on iMovie were exponentially less than the ones I had to ask while doing our collaborative project. I'm now ready to move on to FinalCut Pro because I've been told that if I can use iMovie than I can quickly learn how to use FinalCut Pro. Knowing this encourages me to continue learning how to use programs I've yet to use.

4. How will what you have learned here affect your life? (That's the real test of a class, isn't it?)

I think the affect that Digital Literacy will have on my life is much similar to my response on what the most challenging part of the course was. I've learned that my digital literacy isn't as high as I thought it was and thus it has compelled me to continue on learning in the digital realm. This is how digital literacy has affected my life.

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