Don't change. Have a great summer. You're the best!!!

I feel comfortable thinking that my writing has improved since our course began in January. Personally, I’m ill-equipped to be a fair judge of whether it has, but I am certain that I am completing this course (and certificate) a more informed digitally-enabled writer.

Maybe Hui would be the best judge since her meticulous and unique deconstruction of my first essay proved so insightful. It’s already been said, but it bears saying again, thanks Hui!

Brian, the early peer-criticism during our essay exchange came at precisely the right time: early enough to expose areas that needed attention. After that, the timely and thorough feedback by yourself and Tara was always instructive. Definitely what the Army AAR process would call a major “sustain.”

If my writing has indeed improved, it has likely trailed a path that follows my increased understanding of the JOMC221 pedagogical goals. Writing for Digital Media was not a writing workshop. In the given time, the course scratched the surface of the Internet’s fascinating and continuously expanding impact on virtually every facet of commerce, entertainment, the law, and society in general.

I’m not sure if it was because Bart and I had the lead on discussion during the “Legal Issues” week. Whatever the case, I feel that week imparted the greatest benefit. Not for anything I foresee applying professionally, but for the awareness of how important it is that our culture be allowed to run free along the actual span of the Net’s end-to-end bounds. Today someone with a $1500 laptop can grab images, movies and sounds from what is truly our culture, and repackage and repurpose them to say something far more powerfully than with text alone. Denying Internet users the right to use this form of expression by locking up content is immoral. It’s that simple!

Improvement?

Much has already been said in our discussion forum.

1. To echo Hui, I think we should experience blogging as a community-building activity. Brian already had our rapt attention; why not mandate 3 comments per week on classmates’ blogs? We were encouraged to comment early on, but this should have been sustained throughout. “Flow” is essential to community; comments are essential to flow. I was guilty of not reading as many of my peers’ blogs as I did last semester in JOMC223. Partly this was because last semester was my introduction to blogs. I entered this certificate program without a clue about what HTML stood for. And blogs? My best guess would have been that a blog is when a heavy smoker coughs up (while not smoking) a puff of smoke. Grok on that!
2. Search on blackboard. I think it was Lauren who threw that one out there. My recent experience at my new job leads me to believe the IT gang at UNC could do this quite easily. How about hyperlinks w/in blackboard threaded forums? Not sure if this is really necessary (or possible), but it might spawn some interesting results nonetheless. At times I fear I’m repeating, without acknowledgment, what a classmate has already stated. Search and links might help.
3. I’d love another module that took a purely media futurist-activist look at where online communications could be headed, but are not, because one technology continues to strangle ICT growth in the US: bandwidth. Processor speed and storage continue to keep pace w/ Gordon Moore’s 40+ yr-old maxim; Metcalfe’s law is leveraged through billion’s of networked people and devices, yet bandwidth costs as much as ever and its growth has stagnated.