Blog Assignment 13b

Have the linked courses been beneficial to you and if so how? If not, why not? 


The linked courses worked perfectly. Studying, researching and learning is important and applying it to a creative and technological medium reinforces and enhances the material. I enjoyed both subjects individually, putting them together only made it better.

Have the digital photo/storytelling assignments been worthwhile in helping you learn the technology skills presented? 


Some of the information I was already familiar with and some not, it was worthwhile to me, in that, I was able to see many of the processes that I knew done in a different way and with different programs. Also, there were many assignments that I had never executed even though I was familiar with the programs used.

Have the digital photo/storytelling assignments been worthwhile in helping you learn the popular culture content? 

Yes, very much so, they added dimension, putting images, words and music to thoughts makes you see things from many angles. It turns the learning process into the thinking process.

Do you think that the linked course pairing helped you connect technical skills to content area knowledge? If so, how and if not, what do you think did not work? 


As I said above, both of the courses reinforced the subjects and pushed the students to go beyond just obtaining information, they/we had to use it.

Would you be interested in taking other linked courses if they were offered and would you recommend this pair of linked courses to other students? 


It would be of great personal benefit, to me, to be able to participate in more linked classes. However, I do feel that the workload sometimes seemed like two individual classes with connected and overlapping assignments, however, I could be just lazy.

Is there anything else you can suggest that you feel would improve the digital photography/storytelling half of the linked course pair? 


I would have liked to have compared different types of microphones in more detail and taken the audio mixing a step further.

One option under consideration is to have a linked pair of courses where the content area course would be offered as a traditional 3 hour per week face-to-face course and the digital photo/storytelling course would be offered online, or mostly online.
Three hours of anything can get heavy if one is not careful and I enjoyed and benefitted from the face-to-face in both classes. Visual demonstration is helpful in learning, even if I was not going to be using that particular program; I was always sure what my results needed to be.

Face-to-face also lets us react to our fellow students. It makes it easier to share ideas, see each other’s work, create working relationships and encourages motivation, all things that are not so prominent in on-line classes.