Midterm Self-evaluation

After browsing another student's midterm blog post, I decided to use the same format, with headings and short paragraphs.

Nonfiction book:
I read parts of Net Smart by Howard Rheingold for the non-fiction book assignment. I liked the optimism Rheingold had for the digital age and its development: he was optimistic without being passive or blind to the problems that can arise from technology. His solution to fragmentation, distraction, and the new media becoming vehicles for only destructive things was for people to be proactive and mindful when they use it. His idea is that the new media is still forming, and how we use it today will shape how it develops tomorrow; if we want helpful and inspiring media uses tomorrow, use it for good and inspiring things today.

Novel:
The novel I read was The Hunger Games. It gave me a new frame to think about how the form of technology can change how we interact within it. I wrote a blog post about it. I've talked with several different friends about how The Hunger Games is like the Internet, particularly with online presence (the tributes must create caracatures of themselves in order to stand out and maybe survive longer in the arena) and the people building websites being gamemakers (but a less malevolent version...usually).

On a related note, I found social proof of this method of using established literary works and their worlds to talk about different aspects of our lives, to figure out what's going on, and to give us some reference to know why things are happening. In the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi explains how she used literature to make sense of the oppression and upheaval she and those around her lived under during the tyrannical reign of the morality guards.

Self-directed learning:
I've found that the topics brought up in class, in the Google+ stream, and in the assignments from this class often prompt outside conversation and investigation. Tools I've learned about and tried are Diigo, GoodReads, HitRecord, Bing (to explore beyond Google land), Google+, Blogger (for the class blog), Wordpress (for our magazine project), Twitter, and Google Hangout (I tried to use it for a work meeting...but it didn't work), as well as using tools I was already familiar with in different ways (Facebook for social proof and group coordination, Skype for a work meeting, and youtube as a place to find educational things).

I've also talked about these tools and talked with different people (in and out of the class) about their strong and weak points. I particularly am interested in the idea of social proof—I like that it's okay to present unpolished things for feedback online. I'm also interested in transmedia and exploring how that works with storytelling, especially since I'm on a team trying to create a transmedia story. I also want to continue to explore how technology and new media can help society accomplish things we haven't been able to before—the TED talk about collaboration I watched earlier this year keeps coming to mind—and have been able to try that to some degree with helping publish Menagerie.

Influence of other students:
Other students in this class have both guided my learning and influenced how I interpret what I encounter online. Some blog posts got me thinking about things and led me to sources of information I wouldn't normally have come across on my own. For example, Shelby Boyer's post on cyber bullying was eye-opening to me on its own, yet the article about trolls she linked to gave me even more to think about, and another source to go to to learn about cyber bullying. More recently, Heather Anderson's post in the Google+ stream prompted me to join the conversation by writing a blog post about some more aspects of our interaction with technology.