Evaluation

I have enjoyed this class. The class forced critical thinking, and allowed for engaging learning processes. The abstinence blog was great, for it provided us with the realization that the internet is a tremendous part of our lives and that we may be more dependent on the internet than we originally thought. The media assignment was good, especially with the variety of choices available. The assignment provided examples of internet use and in two cases portrayed dorky stereotypes. The Facebook/MySpace assignment was important for the course, especially because we have lived the emergence of both in our lifetimes. The assignment helped us analyze who we are online, which is important to realize given the prevalence of online communities. The letter assignment sucked because it took more effort than the previous assignments. The outcome was positive though, exposing the real differences that exist between different forms of communication. The academic paper was alright, but had the least impact on my learning from this course. The lack of results from this assignment was probably due to my laziness and love of cutting corners. I used the two books as sources, making the assignment easy and relatively ineffective. The internet community assignment wasn’t very fun for me, especially because I try to stay away from online interaction as much as possible. I don’t like what looks like society’s transition from the real world to cyberspace, so I’m kind of on strike for extensive online communicating. Valuing real interaction made getting deeper involved with the internet unappealing. My love for sports made the assignment tolerable, and some learning did take place. The interview assignment was also a pain in the ass, but ended up being a great learning experience. The wild card assignment was awesome because of the freedom that went along with the assignment. I was able to talk about something I found interesting or at least easy and this created a natural time to reflect on my online communication. The misuse assignment was great and extremely important for the course. Internet misuse is becoming increasing prevalent and we needed to spend time on the issue. This assignment is alright, but maybe in the future should only have to be 300 words.
In the future I would not change much. The spacing of assignments provided an easy way to manage the class with the rest of our lives. I didn’t like doing the reading at all, but many times the chapters easily related with the week’s topic. Sometimes the book didn’t relate to the topic very well though, and I might not grade down for the lack of book referencing because the references often derail the blog’s direction. The word count requirements were good, because if you needed 50 words but only had 30 then you would need to think deeper into the information. Overall I actually enjoyed this class, and that is a difficult thing to say. I have become more aware of the prevalence of the internet, I have become more exposed to the future of communication, and I’ve been able to reflect on aspects of my own communication.