Reflections

This course in Instructional Media has been, to quote The Lord of the Rings, a real eye-opener for me. As I’ve said elsewhere, I have been slow to really embrace the technological advances of the information age. This class allowed me to sample a wide range of online apps that I never would have sought out on my own. I have been introduced to many new, useful tools that I never even heard of before, and many that I have heard of, but wasn’t very familiar with.
The five modules that the course was divided into were simple enough to follow, especially the presentation module. I’ve used PowerPoint many times before now to create slideshows and even poster boards, so I was already pretty familiar with the program. One new feature that I discovered this time around was the ability to create hyperlinks in a presentation to materials online. This is a very useful tool to have when you want to convey information to others. It also came in great handy for my presentation. I am looking to perhaps become a children’s librarian, and I hit upon the idea of creating a tool to help middle school readers find books they might enjoy. The hyperlinks I created on the book lists in my presentation will enable children to find more information not only about those books, but also help them discover similar titles they may enjoy as well.
The communication module was a bit more complex. The 23 Things project seems a good way to introduce newcomers (such as myself) to the many and varied online applications available. Some of them, like Flickr and Youtube, are fairly well known enough that even I have used them. Others, such as NetLibrary, RSS feeds, Zoho and Del.ici.ous, I had no previous experience with and was pleasantly surprised by them. One of my favorite discoveries was the generators, places where you can just have fun by having the websites spit out random ideas for you on just about subject you can imagine. The only thing I didn’t really like in this module was having to blog about my activities. It just seemed like a hassle to think of something interesting to write every time I did something new online.
The podcast module was something very new to me. I was familiar with podcasts, but I had never really bothered to listen to any before, let alone create one myself. Once you had the software to create and convert a podcast, like Audacity, the task becomes fairly straightforward. It was obtaining the software in the first place that became challenging, since some of the links on Blackboard didn’t always work, or the software itself didn’t work. But the podcast itself was fun to record and combine with music, once I got the hang of the program. This is what did for my commentary track: I recorded my own voice speaking and ran it alongside the Brian Henke guitar piece that I had selected, to create a mood of introspection for the piece.
The publication module was also a fairly simple one, once I figured out what to do with it. Microsoft Publisher is a program not unlike PowerPoint, in that you can create information pieces in different formats on both. But Publisher is geared more toward the actual publication of items in printed form than PowerPoint is. The bookmarks that I created were meant to relate to my PowerPoint presentation about children’s books, as a means of pointing children to that presentation and then on to more information about the books described there. The book cover was more just a simple idea pertaining to a potential book that I might write one day. That was roughly how I envisioned that book might appear. I tried to make both into PDF documents, but for some reason, the book cover wouldn’t do so. I had to make it an HTML document instead.
The final module, webpage design, has been most difficult for me, mostly because by the time I got around to this one, I had little time left to figure out how to do it. Nor did I have a real clear idea about what I wanted to create a website about. I just stuck with the idea in the practice piece of creating a portfolio of my work in the other modules. Uploading these materials and publishing in all on web has been challenging at best. I’m still not sure I fully understand all the concepts introduced in this module. Hopefully I’ll learn more when I take Web Design for Libraries
In spite of all the fantastic technologies I’ve encountered throughout this course, (many of which I’m sure I’ll use again at some point) part of me is still reluctant to become a part of the online community, such as it is. One reason is that I want to keep my private life as private as I can, and that’s not easy to do online. Another is that I don’t want to become one of those people who spent more time in the virtual world than in the real world, a state that I’m afraid the whole world may be headed toward. However, as I’ve said before, if this is the direction of society going in, then we may as well embrace it, while remembering that there is a world outside of the Internet too.