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.