Personal Reflection on the Class

Well, where to start?

I think it's best for me to break this down by issues in the class.

Mediation:

I, personally, found the creation of wiki pages more useful than the rest of the assignments. I like to work as part of a group and develop an idea rather than work by myself. I also like the blog - it gives me a place to put my ideas without necessarily making them part of the text of everyone else's responses like Ning. With this class and how this semester is going, I'm incredibly paranoid that I'm not understanding the readings, but when I read other's comments I find that I'm actually on par. I think my paranoia goes down the more separate my ideas are, unless they're working directly with the ideas of others. I guess I don't like the "call and response" type of threaded conversation Ning provides. I also wish these were all in the same location.

Flow and Interruption:

This was obviously a problem for me in that I had personal interruptions in my work in the class (as evidenced on Ning and the wiki in particular). But I also think the flow of the class struggled because we took on huge topics each week (not a bad thing, mind) and each had posting to do, but when it came time for commenting on each other's work, we were limited by the time that they posted or by the time that we posted. I think to really flow, this class would have to have multiple due dates for the same posts so that people kinda "cycled through" an early turn-in date and a later one. I also think some more overlap in teh schedule between weeks would help - it seems that we often drop an author or issue when the readings change.

I'm not sure how I can prove that I've worked on this class since my big interruption - I'm not sure how to bridge the interruption and return the flow. I've been posting all my work on my blog. I feel ashamed for turning work in on Ning after everyone else, like I'm asking them to go back and give me feedback or like I'm chiming in out of sync in some horrible rendition of some horrible song, off-key and a beat behind.

Scope:

Any class that is titled "Media Culture" can be expected to have a very broad scope, but I found it odd that it was so "western" in thought. I think it'd be really interesting to look at works that really either come from other cultures or from a range of historical periods - like Plato's Phaedrus, or something - to develop a more historical and global understanding of media culture.

Representation:

I don't feel as though I can best represent my understanding of each of the readings and questions online. I felt more comfortable using Prezi or some other kind of representation for some of the ideas that felt so abstract - representing them visually or with other types of text really helped me.