Reflective Hypertext Essay:
I chose this course with the only knowledge of it being English 363: Discourse Analysis. I am pretty sure it did not even have Marc Bousquet as the professor. I went into this course thinking it would be a unique experience, but Participatory Culture was not in my guesses of what the topic of the class would be. I knew this was a writing requirement course, and it was a class I could use to fulfill a major requirement. Once we had our first class, I was a little intimidated by the topic and expectations. I soon, however, realized that this topic was extremely interesting and useful for my Creative Writing and English major. Learning that we would be writing within websites and hyper-text, plus unusual informal writing assignments, I was excited to see how I would do and what I would learn. Also, learning to write towards a social media has helped me learn how to communicate in my creative writing in a conversational form. I had never done memes, comics, literature reviews, or quizzes. I have been strictly taught how to write in an academic or creative setting so this new form of literary tools came as a huge excitement to me.
The fast pace of this class kept me busy, yet interested. The readings were extremely hard for me to comprehend, but through re-reading and seeking opinions from other students, I took a lot of informative information from books such as PCH Handbook and Fuchs. The informal and opinionated discussions we had in class and on the blog were of great help and a unique experience. It helped me use the social media tactics that we read about. These were difficult but rewarding. I found the Socratic Dialogue also very fun but difficult. It challenged me but the challenge of this task was also rewarding. My favorite creation task we had was the Timeline of Copyright Issues. As the semester progressed I found the difficulty of the tasks also progressing. The reading was also progressingly more difficult to comprehend. The most difficult book was Spectacle of Disintegration by Wark. Though it was difficult, the informal writing assignment we did with Wark was helpful in my understanding of the information. The presentation on Mickenberg and Kelley was also one of my more favored tasks in this class. Though I may not have done any or all of the assignments perfectly, I felt confident in my effort and enjoyed taking a stab at new ideas and educational tactics.
I expected our midterm project to be our only and final project. I enjoyed doing two projects though. The first project I automatically knew my topic and was so excited to learn more through the different tasks within the project. Choosing Arctic Drilling I was able to incorporate something I am passionate about into the work I had to do for this class. It was tedious and time consuming, but very rewarding. I learned so much about Arctic drilling and Participatory Culture. I was extremely proud of my results and knowledge I received from putting in hard work and time. The most difficult part of this project was probably the literature review. Through putting in time and effort, even if I was not sure if I was doing something right or not, I got to learn a lot about multiple things, which I think was the goal of this class: to learn the steps.
My final project’s topic was a little harder for me to come up with, but I think I learned more useful information in this project than my Arctic Project. This project was on Family Farming in Europe and America and how Europe’s model of agriculture was more supportive of family farms – making this the better way of agriculture. The most informative aspect of this project was the quiz and comparative paragraphs of Europe and English regulations. Another informative section was American farming. The quiz was fun to make, and learning about the how America has many bans on products we Americans use was very insightful and eye opening.
Overall this class was extremely helpful in learning about real world issues as well as Participatory Culture. Though a lot of my knowledge on participatory culture has question marks at the end, it was a great experience dipping my toes into an unknown subject to me. It is also a great feeling to look over my entire amount of course work and see how much I was able to accomplish and how detailed I was able to be. Although it was stressful, the reward was unique and great. Through this class I learned useful ways of writing and was able to learn about important issues in a critical and unbiased manner.
I chose this course with the only knowledge of it being English 363: Discourse Analysis. I am pretty sure it did not even have Marc Bousquet as the professor. I went into this course thinking it would be a unique experience, but Participatory Culture was not in my guesses of what the topic of the class would be. I knew this was a writing requirement course, and it was a class I could use to fulfill a major requirement. Once we had our first class, I was a little intimidated by the topic and expectations. I soon, however, realized that this topic was extremely interesting and useful for my Creative Writing and English major. Learning that we would be writing within websites and hyper-text, plus unusual informal writing assignments, I was excited to see how I would do and what I would learn. Also, learning to write towards a social media has helped me learn how to communicate in my creative writing in a conversational form. I had never done memes, comics, literature reviews, or quizzes. I have been strictly taught how to write in an academic or creative setting so this new form of literary tools came as a huge excitement to me.
The fast pace of this class kept me busy, yet interested. The readings were extremely hard for me to comprehend, but through re-reading and seeking opinions from other students, I took a lot of informative information from books such as PCH Handbook and Fuchs. The informal and opinionated discussions we had in class and on the blog were of great help and a unique experience. It helped me use the social media tactics that we read about. These were difficult but rewarding. I found the Socratic Dialogue also very fun but difficult. It challenged me but the challenge of this task was also rewarding. My favorite creation task we had was the Timeline of Copyright Issues. As the semester progressed I found the difficulty of the tasks also progressing. The reading was also progressingly more difficult to comprehend. The most difficult book was Spectacle of Disintegration by Wark. Though it was difficult, the informal writing assignment we did with Wark was helpful in my understanding of the information. The presentation on Mickenberg and Kelley was also one of my more favored tasks in this class. Though I may not have done any or all of the assignments perfectly, I felt confident in my effort and enjoyed taking a stab at new ideas and educational tactics.
I expected our midterm project to be our only and final project. I enjoyed doing two projects though. The first project I automatically knew my topic and was so excited to learn more through the different tasks within the project. Choosing Arctic Drilling I was able to incorporate something I am passionate about into the work I had to do for this class. It was tedious and time consuming, but very rewarding. I learned so much about Arctic drilling and Participatory Culture. I was extremely proud of my results and knowledge I received from putting in hard work and time. The most difficult part of this project was probably the literature review. Through putting in time and effort, even if I was not sure if I was doing something right or not, I got to learn a lot about multiple things, which I think was the goal of this class: to learn the steps.
My final project’s topic was a little harder for me to come up with, but I think I learned more useful information in this project than my Arctic Project. This project was on Family Farming in Europe and America and how Europe’s model of agriculture was more supportive of family farms – making this the better way of agriculture. The most informative aspect of this project was the quiz and comparative paragraphs of Europe and English regulations. Another informative section was American farming. The quiz was fun to make, and learning about the how America has many bans on products we Americans use was very insightful and eye opening.
Overall this class was extremely helpful in learning about real world issues as well as Participatory Culture. Though a lot of my knowledge on participatory culture has question marks at the end, it was a great experience dipping my toes into an unknown subject to me. It is also a great feeling to look over my entire amount of course work and see how much I was able to accomplish and how detailed I was able to be. Although it was stressful, the reward was unique and great. Through this class I learned useful ways of writing and was able to learn about important issues in a critical and unbiased manner.
