Reflective Post

   You know, looking back, I see that I didn't really have any idea what I was getting myself into when I signed up for this class. I thought that "Digital Civilization" sounded like it would be interesting, but beyond that, I didn't know what to expect. This class has been challenging and even frustrating at times, but now, looking back, I'm actually really glad that I took it. It helped me shift some of my paradigms, particularly those that have to do with how I learn. In most classes, you learn the material mostly for the sake of the class, and little of what you learn actually gets put to use later, but in this class, the professors made a serious effort to make sure that the things that we've learned, like the principles of self-directed learning, social proofing, collaboration, and the use of different digital tools, could be applied beyond this class. Also, I don't think that I've ever been challenged to put in as much original thought into my work as I have been in this class. The blogging that we were assigned to do was a great exercise in personal creativity, and helped me formulate and refine my thoughts on whatever topic that I happened to want to blog about. Some of these topics had nothing at all to do with digital civilization, but the blogging still helped me refine and clarify my thoughts about them. See my posts on Criminal Records and  Fear and Paranoia for examples.
    To be honest, the requirement to blog frequently was hard for me. I enjoyed it because of how it helped me refine my thinking, but it was simply hard for me to blog as often as we were supposed to, and sometimes I didn't quite get enough blog posts out there. One problem for me was that I don't like putting out low-quality work for people to read, and so I always wanted to take the time to write a good, sincere, and well-written blog post, and I often didn't have that time. The other problem was my thinking process. I would often sit and think about a certain topic for a while before writing anything in a blog post, and then once I thought I had something to write about, I would sit and start typing. However, the difficulty was that I would still be thinking about the topic as I'm writing, and partway through, I'd have an epiphany or a sudden realization about my topic, some new thought or a different perspective that would completely change what I thought about it. Now, if I hadn't been trying to write a blog post on that topic I for sure wouldn't have thought so in depth about it, so that part of it was good, but at the same time it was really frustrating, because I would have to make some serious changes to what I written (if not entirely rewrite it) in order to account for the new thoughts or perspectives, and that could take a lot of time. I still have several drafts that never got finished because of precisely this. Here's a blog post that I wrote on this same issue (please remember that I was pretty frustrated at the time). Oh well. Overall, the blogging was still a very positive experience, and I'm grateful for it, even though it was challenging.
   I suppose that I better get to talking about the learning outcomes. I'll just talk about them in bullet point fashion, for simplicity's sake.

1. History:  I found the approach to the history portion of this class to be unique, because we were basically set loose to go and learn whatever most interested us about a certain time period in history. I appreciated that, because it let me focus on learning or talking about the aspects of history that actually interested me, like the creation and spread of new technologies, the rise and fall of empires and countries, and different forms of government and power. It was also interesting to me to see the approaches other groups took when teaching about their time periods. 
2. Core Concepts:  The digital concepts that we talked about in class certainly did offer a new way to look at history, as well as at our current society. I had thought about the concept of control some, though I thought of it as power, rather than control, and I was maybe a little bit familiar with the concepts of participation (I had heard of open-source) and information (we do live in the "information age", after all), and I had never even heard of the concept of openness, not like we talked about in class. I definitely think about all of these concepts a lot more now than I did before. I can't imagine talking about things like the government and society without considering openness, control, etc.
3. Digital Literacy:  Digital literacy revolves around three concepts: Consume, Connect, and Create. I think that I've learned more about these three concepts than our professors ever intended. I was a leader in the Inquiry group for our final ebook project, and though I don't think we ever realized that we were copying the learning objectives, these three points were the main sections of my group's content for the ebook. Of course, we were looking at these concepts from the angle of using them to do research, but still. I feel very familiar with these concepts now, and I'm actually really glad that I got to know them so well, because they will come in very handy in the future, especially when I begin to do research for my honors thesis and what not. Actually, the final project was probably what I learned the most from in this class.
4. Self-Directed Learning:  I hadn't ever really thought about being a self-directed learner before this class. I guess that this was because that before there was so much that I was required to learn about that I wouldn't have chosen to learn about on my own, but I had to learn anyway, that I just got used to not choosing what I would learn about, and letting others dictate what I needed to know. Now, I understand that while there is a lot of stuff out there that I need to know that I wouldn't necessarily choose to learn if it were left up to me, I'm still more than able and free to go and learn about whatever I want. I've been able to do that some for my blog posts. Look at The Digital World Outruns the Physical World and America's got a lot of credit card debt  for some examples of posts that I had to do some self-directed research for. Once I'm done with college, no one's going to be there to tell me to keep learning stuff. I'll have to do it on my own.
5. Collaboration:  I've learned quite a bit about collaboration in this class, mostly through the final project. I think that the most important thing I've learned about trying to do collaborative projects is how important it is that the people you are collaborating with be enthusiastic and interested in the project. If they aren't, trying to work with them to get stuff done is like herding cats: difficult and frustrating. If they are interested and enthusiastic, though, then it's pretty remarkable how much stuff you can do together. I think that this insight will be pretty important in the future for me.

All in all, I learned a lot from this class, and I'm glad that I took it. It was challenging in some ways (ok, a lot of ways), but nothing that's truly worth it is ever easy. I think that I would definitely recommend this class to a friend in the future.

The Event

I think that the event went quite well, despite setbacks with technical difficulties, and the audience that we managed to gather was quite impressive, for the last day of classes, at any rate. I invited quite a few people, but sadly, I have to admit that, as far as I know, none of them came or watched the event online. At first I tried to think of who I could invite that would be more likely to be interested in the event, but then I realized that I couldn't really think of anyone who would likely be more interested than anyone else, so I just started inviting everyone. I talked to my family, including two of my brothers who are up at BYU-I, and invited them to watch the event online, I invited a bunch of my coworkers at my job, I invited my roommates, and a few other people in my ward, I put up fliers around my apartment building, and I even got permission from a couple of my professors to announce the event in two of my classes. I also sent an email to one of the people on my group's "thought leader/interested person" list; a professor here at BYU named Amy Jensen, inviting her to the event as well as asking her if she could do some social proofing on our content for us (she never got back to me, though). Some of these people even came up to me later and asked me for more details on the event, but unfortunately, as far as I know, none of them actually came. Oh, well.
      The actual event went pretty well, I thought, and was actually pretty fun (especially once my presentation was over, because then I didn't have to be nervous anymore. :p). I gave the presentation for my group (Inquiry), and I thought that it went really well, much better than in the rehearsals. My presentation was also the only one that didn't have any technical difficulties, though of course I can't take any credit for that. :p
    I didn't have my computer with me, and I don't have a twitter account, so I'm not really sure if our group (Inquiry) got any questions from the online chat feed. At least, Jamie didn't have any questions for us during the event. I didn't really expect many questions though, seeing that research isn't exactly the most exciting topic, but it would have been cool if there had been a question or two.
   All in all, I thought the event was pretty fun. I'm glad that we did it. It was neat to be able to do something real, something that would be seen by real people.

The Create Section...

Create

            Why do people do research? Sometimes, people do research out of a simple desire for knowledge. They are simply curious about a certain topic, and they want to know more about it. More often, though, research is done with a purpose in mind. People want to learn more about a topic for a reason. What that reason is can vary greatly, from legislators considering new laws on unfamiliar issues to scientists conducting research about a new technology to a student preparing a research paper for class. Generally though, people do research so that they can use the knowledge they gain to do or accomplish or make something, or in other words, to create. Research done with the end goal of creating something is also the most thorough, effective, and engaging kind of research to do, particularly if the new material created is new, and also if the researcher intends for his material to be read, seen, or used by a real audience, for a real purpose.

            However, actually creating new material or content has for a long time been quite difficult, time-consuming, and even expensive to do, and getting into the hands of a real audience that might appreciate it can be even more troublesome. This is especially true of students writing research papers, as audiences outside of the classroom can be very difficult to find. This has led to the general belief that unless you are a skilled professional established in your field, you can’t actually create or do anything “real.” Students don’t do “real” research papers; they just write 10-page essays on some topic that they looked up in some book in the library, that will only ever be read by their teacher. Amateur filmmakers can’t make “real” movies that real audiences will see; they only make short video clips that they and their friends can enjoy. Amateur writers can’t make “real” books that lots of people will read unless they’re lucky or good enough for a publisher to want to take a chance on them.

            Fortunately, thanks to the technologies and methods of communication that have become available in today’s digital world, this isn’t the case anymore. There are all kinds of ways for quite a variety of content to easily be created and shared across the world with minimal effort. We’ll discuss some of these technologies later on, but the main point is that the average person can’t make “real” content. It’s not true that students can’t do real research, or that amateurs can’t make movies or write stories that many people will read.

            However, technology has moved a bit quicker than the mindset of the people. Many of us are still so unused to the idea that we can make real content that we don’t grasp the importance or the benefits of doing so. The following selection is a portion of a presentation given by Taylor Williams, a student at Brigham Young University and one of the authors of this ebook (particularly of this chapter), to a group of professors and students on this topic. He addresses many of the reasons why creating new and “real” content is important, mostly in the context of student research papers:

“Why create? And what do we even mean by “create?” By “create,” we mean coming up with new content, which can be in the form of text, books, pictures, videos, or any number of different formats. Technically, many students already do create new content all the time. Students pick topics, do research, study and work hard for hours on end, and produce a hopefully decent research paper or project to turn in to their professors. This isn’t bad, because it gives students valuable experience in how to write research papers, but there’s a better way to do it. As is, most of these papers are written for the sole purpose of getting a good grade.  Also, the only people who will likely ever read these papers (aside from the students who wrote them) are the students’ professors, and maybe their TA’s.  After the professor reads it, and a grade is given, usually the paper is then either thrown away immediately, or is shoved in a drawer somewhere for a year or two and then thrown away anyway. Though understandable, doesn’t this seem a bit ironic? We teach students how to do research and write papers on their research so that they can do it on their own for real topics and real audiences later on in their lives and careers, but while they’re in the process of learning how to do these things, most if not all of their research papers wind up going nowhere except the trash can. Not exactly motivating, and it’s not a realistic experience for the future, because when students move on into their careers and have to do research and whatnot there, they will be writing for very real audiences, and their research will going much farther than the trash can (we hope, anyways). Also, since the end goal of most students’ research papers or projects is to get a good grade and nothing more, many students will fall into the habit of coming up with stuff that’s only good enough to get the grade they want, rather than getting into the habit of doing quality research, which is the point of teaching them how to do research in the first place. So again, as is, most students technically create already, but since they know that stuff they create is only going to be read by one or two people, and because it’s written mostly just for the sake of a grade, these students aren’t creating for real. 

“We propose a different approach. Since the idea of teaching students how to research and how to write papers or do projects is so that they will be able to do these things on real topics for real audiences someday on their own, why not have them do it on real topics for real audiences as they are learning how to do it? This is what we mean by creating. Making real stuff to be read or used by real people.  We want to have students be able to actually create. While this might not have been realistically feasible in the past, it certainly is now, thanks to the options that technology has opened up. We’ll talk more about the tools we can use for this later on. Now again, why have students create? There are a number of significant reasons.  First, let’s talk about the motivation factor. Let’s say that we give a student an assignment to write a paper, and tell him that the only person who is going to read it is his professor. Now let’s take that same student, and give him another assignment to write another paper, but this time tell him that not only will his professor read it, but it will be made available for all of his classmates and maybe even other professors and students outside of his class to read. Which of the two papers do you think that he will be more motivated to do a better job on?  Students will be more motivated to put more higher-quality work into their papers and projects when they are writing them for a real audience. 

“Also, creating real content or material for a real audience is also much more personally meaningful to the student. The satisfaction one gets from successfully making something is always significant, and the satisfaction and sense of personal achievement that comes from making something real that real people will see and use is almost enough of a reward in and of itself to merit doing so. Think of the young teenager who spends hours putting together and editing a short video that he then posts on Youtube. Imagine his satisfaction when he gets thousands of views on it (or even hundreds of thousands of views, if it’s a good video). This same idea can also apply to research papers and other school assignments. I have a friend who in her first year at college was assigned a significant research project. However, her forward-thinking professor decided to have his students write articles on their topics for Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia, rather than a traditional research paper. As you can imagine, knowing that what she wrote would be available on the internet for anyone in the world to read made the project a bit more intense for her than it would have been otherwise, but she said afterwards that it was the most satisfying and meaningful assignment that she had ever done, because she knew that she had actually made something “real,” that real people might read and use.”

Through the many digital tools available through the internet, it is remarkably easy for people to find ways to create content and find audiences for it, thus making “real” content and material. Most of the principles and tools behind finding audiences for your content are the same as those described in the “Connect” section of this chapter, such as utilizing social networking sites, finding websites or blogs of people who write about your topic, etc., so we will simply refer the reader to that section of the chapter for that. However, as for tools that one can use to create their content and make it available to see, we will list a few examples, though by no means should this be taken as a complete or comprehensive list. We encourage the reader to be creative in how they create their content.

●     As the friend that Taylor Williams mentioned in his presentation did, one could use a Wikipedia article as an effective way of making their research available to anyone who might have an interest in the subject. Also, a Wikipedia article is an excellent platform to use, because other types of content aside from text can easily be included or at least linked to it, such as videos, ebooks, etc.

●     An ebook (such as this one) is an excellent format for books, stories, research papers, and a host of other things. This could be a particularly useful format in an academic setting, as student’s projects could be done in ebooks, and also examples of works or assignments written by the professor or even former classes could be easily kept and made available for new students every year.  

●     Blogs are becoming increasingly common, as they are very easy to make publicly available, and are useful for inviting feedback on your content, through comments.

●     Video is an incredibly versatile and useful format, as it can easily be uploaded to the internet, and can also easily be included in other content formats, such as ebooks, blogs, social networking sites, etc. Video can be used to record many types of content, from interviews, animated presentations or explanations, recordings of live presentations, music, or just whatever a person wants to film.

Many of the tools listed can easily be used in conjunction with one another, to great effect.

            It is very easy for people to create new content with the tools that our modern digital civilization has provided for us. It is nearly as easy now to create new content as it is to learn about old content. Now we can learn in order to create, not simply learn in order to learn.