That’s a Wrap: Major Learning Project

Can You Believe It?

First off, shoutout to Durston for being remarkably fast at thinking of a song title within the criteria I gave him. Props to him for helping me think of a song I could use for my song title! Anyways, prior to taking this course, I never in a million years thought that I would be a guest of a podcast let alone be a cohost! Durston and I have been working pretty hard on our podcast episodes—from making a script with guiding questions, and supplemental resources for each episode, all the way to the technical stuff of editing the raw recordings, adding music, and uploading it to Spotify. I have been super fortunate that Durston has been heading up most of the technical side of things, as that really isn’t my wheelhouse. I was hoping to get better at it over the course of recording episodes, but because of time restraints, I thought that I would create other resources to supplement the work that he was doing. This is something that I would like to learn in the future, but I think it’s going to take a lot of time, and a whole heck of a lot of practice. We proved to be a pretty good team, that came with different skill sets and were able to utilize our strengths in different ways. Maybe he feels different, but I am thinking that it worked out pretty well.

Moving and Growing

As I mentioned previously, there is a lot that I want to get better at. However, I am pretty proud of the way that we learned to work together, taking turns to speak, and guide the conversation, as well as who created or covered what aspects of the podcast. One of our goals when we first started was to keep the podcast around 30 minutes, which we have done for all four episodes so far! The last one was the longest, but when you’re summarizing a whole course between two people, it probably should be longer than 15 minutes, right? Anyways, besides feeling a little bit self-conscious about the timing of the last one, I think that we hit up all of the points that we wanted to speak to.

A few things that we could definitely improve on (besides me being able to edit the podcast and put it together), would probably be to vary up the type of people we had as guests and to make a road map if we are going to continue on this journey. I think that I would also like to be able to create more supplemental resources or guides to go with each podcast to get the listeners more engaged. Maybe talking points or guiding questions as they have for some books. I think too in the future, we could look at video recording ourselves to add an added feature to the podcast episodes. To be 100% honest, it was pretty nice to only have to worry about what I was saying rather than what my face and hands were doing while I was talking. But it’s always something to consider. That being said, we have another podcast episode other than the summary of learning published. If you have the time, we’d love you to stop and take a listen! I am jumping the gun a little bit here and posting this blog post prior to the episode being published on Thursday. Please check back, and on Thursday I’ll have the correct blog episode posted below. Thanks for understanding!

https://anchor.fm/potentiallyeducational

But let’s get back to the reflection piece here. I felt that I was becoming more confident in my podcast speaking abilities as the episodes when on. I wasn’t as worried about the ‘um’, ‘right?’, ‘you know’ and other phrases that I often feel as if I use too often (you probably will look for them now while listening I bet). I think trying something new is always the hardest part. Once you try it out a couple of times, you get a better idea of where you stand and what you need to do to get better at it. I can’t say that I have the voice of radio or the wit and humor for a super famous podcast, but I had a blast doing it and I learned so much. It was also great working with someone who I haven’t worked with prior to the course and it was just a nice change of pace and a way to exhibit the learning that was happening throughout the course. A special thanks to Durston for being an excellent teammate, and a super technologically talented one to boot!

Final EC&I 832 Thoughts

It’s so wild to me to think that the course is already coming to an end, and final thoughts will be shared before we all move along on our separate paths. Some paths may diverge, and some may not. But it was definitely a great learning experience this semester. Like always, I always love to hear your feedback—like/share, leave a general comment, or answer one or more of the prompting questions below. Thanks for tuning in this semester, I couldn’t have done it without all Y’all!

1. What was your biggest takeaway from this course?
2. What is something that you want to continue to learn about as you move forward?
3. If at all, how has your perspective around digital citizenship and identity shifted or changed?
4. What was one thing that you wish you would have changed for your major learning project?
5. If you could do it all over again, would you choose the same major learning project? Why or why not?