Reading response 5--A review of this course (Inquiry into digital content)

The last two weeks past so fast, I cannot believe I have learnt things taught for three months. First of all, I want to appreciate Nancy, the instructor of this summer course for her wonderful guiding in this inquiry journey, which provided me with a big picture on digital content about theories, applications, realities and ethical issues as well as tons of information and research. In the class, we were offered opportunities to discuss the application of digital content in educational field and the relevant hot topics, watch excellent videos, examine articles, digging out what we’ve known and exploring what we don’t know. What an unforgettable knowledge-building experience in such a short time! I even cannot believe I could make videos with storytelling via available digital tools, along with critical thoughts just within two weeks, which will definitely help me use these skills in my future career.

I am also grateful to my great team members—Vanita and Amanda, to collaborate with me for the final project (http://digitalinquiry.webs.com/). I am so proud of my team and this project as it is the achievement of our hard working in such intensive class. I will never forget the experience that we three got together for brainstorming and designing then went back home until 9pm in the past whole week. This final project is like a comprehensive package, allowing us to integrate the theories we’ve learnt in the class into the real practice. We indeed had difficulties and experienced frustrations during the process of the design, which were articulated in our narrative part in the project web link. Although Nancy helped us build the confidence in the class that it is the human being control the technology, I felt that we were sometimes controlled by technology in the real practice no matter whether we admit it or not. The digital tools we used have many limitations and they cannot 100% realize the effect we expected. We did spend a large amount of time fighting with the difficulties and figuring out how we could obtain the effect that we expected in the design of the video and the website. However, we are aware that there is no best, but better in the world. If we were offered more time and if some digital tools are better designed, we might do it better. :-)

This process of completing the final project reminds me of the experience in Dr. Michele Jacobsen’s class—User Centered Design (http://people.ucalgary.ca/~dmjacobs/eder679.27/)

through which I got a better understanding on the notions of usability and utility in a interactive digital product. And, Nancy’s course enhanced my skills in using storytelling to better communicate for educational purposes. Both of the two courses helped my team members and me a lot to finish a digital package within our capabilities.

In the end, I want to finish it with a question for myself, maybe it is a little bit unrealistic. As users and residents in digital world, everyday, we not only enjoy the conveniences and joys it brings to us, but also face many frustrations caused by digital tools. Take I movie and movie maker for example, the only way for our team to combine two videos done by these two tools was first to upload them to youtube, then use other convert software to download them and finally merge them.  It was just one step for our whole project, and there were at least three sub-steps to successfully finish this marriage. Therefore, there is no wonder many educators fear the changes brought by technology. How many unexpected things will they confront with if their whole days are full of digital tools? I sometimes teased my husband, a software developer, using this question, “can you software guys design the software more usable and reasonable, so that we educators can better use them for teaching and don’t have to waste time to cry?” From this perspective, is it a good way to have all the engineers or technology guys take relevant courses to enhance their digital literacy or design skills before we users frustrate these problems?

Once again, a big thank you to my instructor, Nancy, and my wonderful classmates.