Thursday, December 2, 2010

Guitar Lesson 5

Reflection

DS106 was a class that I never saw coming when I signed up for it in the summer. I was shocked when I realized that it was not about video games, since the book had a lot on creating stories for video games and such. After that shock, I was kind of disappointed that it was going to be about the web and that we had to read or listen to long articles or speeches about Web 2.0 and how it came to be and how it eventually died (I don’t think the web is dead though). But it was after those couple of weeks when the fun and cool stuff starting rolling out in front of me.

We started experimenting with our blog and changing things on it with plug-ins and personalizing it to our tastes. We did things such as taking pictures, which I have not really done before, and messing with audio with Audacity. These were things I never imagined I would ever do in a class, let alone in my free time. Then when the video experimenting came in, I had a blast as I could use video games in my work and express them to other people. The Videos were the best part for me (except the screen casting one, because my town was pretty much a big corn field and that was it) but the mash ups were the best of the video stuff though I admit I wished I could tamper with mine more to fix some of the audio problems that I had. I was even encouraged to pick up my guitar and learn how to play it and teach some of the things I learned to my fellow peers in the hopes of getting them to start guitar or picking that dusty guitar back up and messing with it once again.

Though DS106 was pretty much overall an awesome class, there were some problems I had which dealt with the blogs in particular. When I learned that it was going to cost me about 50 dollars for this class, I almost decided to leave especially because I did not have a credit card. But Grooms was nice enough to help me get through that problem to start the blog so that was a relief in the class. Another problem was in my computer itself which led to some frustrating problems with editing videos such as the mash ups. But other than those small issues, the class was awesome.

I have to admit though that in the beginning of the class, I was kind of in a slow start in my blog progress but I caught up to speed during the audio parts and the video parts. My Digital story also was suppose to be around 8 – 10 videos but in the end I only got about 5 or 6 which meant the project became more of a bi-weekly thing than a weekly one. But I think I managed to get some of the more important parts of the guitar and I showed how the Web and its guitar community can help you learn how to play guitar in ways never before possible. I was probably horrible though at commenting on other people’s blogs as I did about an average of maybe 2 comments a week. Commenting was bad for me because I would have trouble giving people comments that have not already been said to them. Also the fan fiction one was kind of a low point for me since all it was, was a list but some of the other things I had planned ending up not working for my taste.

DS106 was a pretty cool class in the end and I was amazed that on some of my work I was praised for it by Grooms. I thought a lot of people did amazing things such as Kevin’s mash ups and I wished I commented more on them. But I’m happy with my results in this class as I learned things that I never knew and during this semester I actually became a go to guy for my friends when it came to videos and audio, which would have never happened if I did not take this class.