Contributions

As this semester comes to a close, I am writing this post to discuss how I interacted with my EDTC community. I began this class with very little experience with interacting online as I don’t have any social media accounts other than Facebook (and now Discord). I also use a flip-phone (they are amazing and I shall continue to use one) so any time I wished to read the discussions held in discord I would need to access my computer to do so, making it more of an intentional decision, rather than a quick and easy check. I did not see this as too much of an inconvienience however, and greatly enjoyed reading the various resources shared through the community-in-online-learning-chat, and I found that whenever I found myself stuck on creating a blog-post or using edusites the question I wanted to ask was often already asked and well explained in one of the other communication tabs. Though I enjoyed reading from the resources on discord, I often felt reluctant in posting anything or asking for help from the class myself and other than reacting to a few messages I only posted a single time on the discord chat. The video I shared was about a break-through in AI generated videos, and I was reminded of it through our classes discussing the development of AI and their use in the classroom environment.

Outside of discord, the majority of my contributions I feel would come from my interactions with classmates during the lecture’s breakout sessions where I could interact with a smaller group and discuss ideas/thoughts together before sharing these to the classroom as a whole. For debriefing a discussion held in front of the entire class myself, I believe I only did this twice.

For commenting on blogs, I postponed this for the first length of the semester as I felt awkward and didn’t think that I could contribute anything meaningful to the posts with my comments. I just recently transferred into Education and didn’t feel that my insight or opinions could be worth very much. This feeling persisted for most of the semester, but after reading various comments I was getting on my own blog posts I realized that the comments didn’t need to hold anything too important but just the act of receiving interaction, encouragement, feedback, or even a suggestion/resource was very nice and encouraging. When I was struggling with my learning project, just having words of encouragement to read felt nice and gave motivation in itself. Seeing this, I started to write a comment every now and then however still felt awkward and didn’t reach the suggested amount per week. I forgot to screenshot some of my comments, so all I have are comments that I wrote near the end of the semester to try to get closer to the required amount for the class.

Earlier in the post I mentioned how some comments I received provided me with a nice resource, motivation, or suggestion. At first I didn’t say anything to these comments, but as the semester was nearing the end I felt the need to reply and let them know how they influenced my progress in my learning-project, or just a word of thanks.

Now that I’m reflecting on how my interactions with others went this semester, I find myself regretting my lower levels of interaction. The last few weeks when I was trying to be more active, comment more, and share resources were a lot more fulfilling and interesting to me than the majority of the class when I was silent and simply watched. I now see how building an online community can help bring both fresh new ideas and resources that I never would have found by myself into the mix. Even though I feel I dropped the ball when it comes to my levels of interaction in the class, I found this class very helpful.