Reflective Blog Post II

This post is to represent how I have viewed my recent progress and where I stand in regards to my Digital Civilization course objectives & requirements.

Historical Content:

I feel as though I've taken a larger step at understanding and researching the historical aspects of our weekly topics. Rather than dive into the breadth of a topic (which is rather boring and overwhelming) I chose to select a specific individual, concept, or theme and dive into that for as much information as I could reasonably justify with my schedule. After gaining an interest in the work they spent their lives doing, I would then have the motivation and drive to do additional research on the random questions that came to me pertaining to the overall subject.

Computing Concepts and Digital Culture:

I've found it very fascinating to begin to relate the digital culture to reality. Identifying various case studies in class and on my own time have shown many similarities with how people behave and what influences them to act. Even though I'm majoring in a very technical major (Information Systems), I'm still constantly learning new tools and of new sites that change the way businesses and organizations operate. Often times these tools enable them to gain unimaginable success if they were to attempt to pursue their interests on their own within their own community.

Self-Directed Learning (utilizing the three Cs of Consume, Create, and Connect):

Consume- One of the main areas I've evolved my research for finding the very basic information on an individual is not through Wikipedia, but rather through Prezi.com now. I've found that there are many presentations publicly available that only highlight the main accomplishments and milestones of a person's life and leave out the excessive in-depth analysis. This has saved me considerable time and from there I tend to find one category or bullet point that interests me and I dive into that more through other sites and try to find documentaries, books, and simply other sites that have already explained the given situation/event.

Create- I've generated some analysis of topics covered in class via animoto.com and prezi.com. If I were to select the area needing improvement most it would definitely be this one as I pictured in my mind that this category directly applied to our digital labs and not really to the historical content of our class.

Connect- Along with focusing my efforts more on the historical content this last month or so, I've also worked more on the networking ("Connect") aspect of the class. The digital tool "NetworkedBlogs", which integrates your blog posts seamlessly with your Facebook profile page, has really enabled my posts to be viewed by a much larger audience. I've received many more comments (sometimes via my Facebook wall rather than directly on the blog entry) that have generated discussions and thoughts from others. In the process of networking, I connected with an individual who writes on occasion posts on her Hubpage. She suggested her site and later followed up with a few messages containing supporting links to a topic I wrote an blog entry on. Overall, the Connect aspect has considerably improved since the last reflective blog post.

Overall, I feel as though I'm better equipped to efficiently and effectively do research on various subjects. I'm seeing the value of venturing outside of a simple Google and/or a Wikipedia search and I can find what I'm looking for much quicker than crossing my fingers and hoping that the first ten sites Google pulls from my original search contains exactly what I'm looking for.