Mary’s blog

After two weeks in this course, I’m not sure about a lot of things. I feel like the more we do in class, the more questions and the more possibilities arise.

It reminds me a lot of when I was in calculus in high school…I would go to class, pay attention, faithfully take notes and when it came time to actually do the work I would stumble. I stumbled all the way through the class and got to the AP test where I ended up drawing pictures on the answer page because I didn’t know how to do it. But then after the test was over, my friends told me they didn’t understand how to use calculus to do the problems either, so they used the knowledge they had from their physics class to complete it. (If this story doesn’t make sense yet hopefully it will soon) So regardless of how well I learned the material compared to my classmates they still had outside knowledge to help them complete it.

That said, I think I’m going to have to step my game up. The concepts in this class are something completely foreign to me but I feel like a lot of my concerns are specific to my topic (and not necessarily of a digital nature). For example, figuring out copyright and who has rights to what and how to get permission to obtain and use stuff. Or tracking down James Farmer’s real birth date or where to even start looking for concrete examples of Farmer correspondence with Malcolm X. And (here’s the kicker) how to do all of this for free without having to subscribe to some year-long service for $1287329894639863827/month.

After reading the book, I’m not sure if I’m getting a lot out of it. I’m familiar with the programs mentioned like Adobe Photoshop, Quicktime, etc. I’ve looked at html and I sort of understand the concepts and if need be, with time and effort of course, could figure out how to write some. I know this is an awful example, but when I was really into using my myspace page (I know myspace…ewwww) there was an editor program you could use and put in all the stuff you wanted like background color or an image and text size, font, etc and basic layout of the page. Then it would compile some html for you to cut and paste into your profile and voila! New myspace layout. By looking at that, I started to see patterns in the html. I’m sure there are better ways to learn about it, but I thought it was cool.

I’m not sure how I feel about the pace. I feel like it’s really slow when we are getting lectured to but that it’s really fast when we have to do hands-on. Maybe we could get a basic summary of something and then learn about it step by step because I feel like I’m less bogged down by terminology when I see it and make a connection. Like instead of telling me all the great features an application has, show me how to use all the great features. I’d love to have time to play around on a site in class to figure out what’s cool, what’s not, what went wrong and why. Maybe say “here’s a program, it can do *list features* you have 15/20 minutes to play with it and then we will discuss.” So then afterwards you can be like “did you see this feature? it’s so cool because _______”

Anyway, that’s just what I think. I really have a handle on this blog thing because we use it so frequently, so that’s good. And I’m totally not bashing the way the class has gone so far. It’s by no means at all bad, I just think it needs a little tweak