Sunday, June 14, 2015

What the Hell is This?

A Reflection on Week 1 of INTE 5340


Have you ever watched a cat enter a room for the first time? I'm that cat. I sneak in past the door and creep around the periphery of the room, hugging the wall. I take my time. I sniff everything. I circle the room, and then start checking under all the furniture. I crawl into any open container and sit for a minute. I jump up onto all horizontal surfaces. It will be quite a while before I venture into the open, but when I do it will be with authority.

The big issues this week were mostly navigational - figuring out how to find and be found (posts and tweets), how to coordinate the parts of my network, how to find my way around the course materials and around ds106, how to manage the deadlines and expectations, how to employ the many communication channels among the class participants. It's all a work very much in progress, but progress I made.

I thought a lot about what makes a story "digital," and whether being digital makes a story fundamentally different. I thought a lot about literacy, multiple literacies, whether the words "literacy" and "story" are tossed around too much or too little. I wondered why everyone isn't required to study sociology at some point in their lives.

I posted the following:

Though I struggled (as always) with time management, I was pretty happy with my output. I like getting my writing head loosened up, and I began to reach out to classmates on Twitter. I've always read Twitter, but I'm eager to establish a habit of tweeting. I would give myself a 9/10 for the week - I was pretty happy with my work, and I put a lot of time into tweaking my social media infrastructure so it will work well for the course.

I did not dive particularly deeply into L&K's first chapter, but I'm looking forward to the second chapter. I made careful note of the references to Gee and Rheingold - I hope to pursue some of their work before long.

Finally, I love telling stories and I love being funny, and I'm glad I will be doing a lot of both this summer!

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