My Course Learnings 

Over the past ten weeks my thinking about digital culture and literature have changed a lot. This is my first term in college and before now I haven’t been a big reader. I never found the right book but I’ve also been consumed by social media and all other things in life. I didn’t make time to read books all the way through. Reading Frankenstein was cool because I got to really analyze and dive deep into a piece of work that I wouldn’t ordinarily choose if I were at the library. I realized I have been judging books by their cover. Learning about the history of Frankenstein, the different versions, and about Mary Shelley’s life showed me literature is an art. Shelley’s writing style enveloped me in rich imagery and I loved it. Frankenstein really made me reflect on the human condition and how stress can consume one.

I enjoyed learning about the romantic era of writing and want to read more works from this time. In class, we thought about the sublime and picturesque. I learned that the sublime is a masculine perception of nature where one feels that they are conquering the beauty. We talked about how sensibility is a capacity to feel for others’ sorrow and for beauty. I noted that “The way we respond to art and beauty in the world is connected to how we respond to the emotions of others”. This was a valuable learning for me. This made me reflect on myself because I often become very moved by others emotions and by art.

Digital Competencies

This term I learned how to make a WordPress blog. In this, I learned how to customize my blog, embed images, embed alt-text, troubleshoot, manage files. I also was introduced to Voyant which is a very cool technology that lets you oversee a text in a new way. I learned about Intertextuality. I feel proud and content with the fact that I really learned everything in this course as I felt I was meant to and never felt lost. I feel like I gained a lot of digital competencies even through review of skills I already had. I also became more educated about AI through the articles we read in the beginning of the term and the lectures. I am thinking about things like “affordances and limitations of different media formats” now and considering the accessibility of websites which I hadn’t before. I really value these new skills and feel excited for my future learnings over the nest for years. Also, the shared notes for class is a new thing for me because I haven’t had shared notes in any other classes but I think it’s a really good and helpful tool. I do believe that this course will contribute to my academic and professional future! The first thing I think of is my new WordPress skills and understanding of accessibility on websites. I definitely am interested in making a portfolio for my work and possibly my art in the future. Everything that we were taught in this course is now stored in my brain and I think that’s so cool. I’m thinking about digital competencies, intertextuality, biopolitics, and romantic era writing every day. I’m happy to be in college. This class has been a joy. 

More Reflections

My attendance for this class has been very good. I think I only missed two classes due to illness/health conditions and reviewed the slides and readings as needed. I have contributed to my peers learning by writing in the shared notes since it’s no extra trouble- I would be taking notes anyway. Also, in my discussion section my group for the term was pretty harmonious. We would really bounce off of each others ideas when we did exercises together. I would suggest for future students in this class to really give themselves to the learning. After hearing about the widespread use of AI in the class, I realized that many of my peers don’t commit to learning. They aren’t too interested in really learning so that they can really perform academically. This class was not too hard for me. It was challenging at times but because I was engaged with the content it was not hard to do lab notebooks and reflections. This class is not homework-heavy. We read one book and we learned a lot about digital competencies and other things concerning the digital world which are very relevant. I feel that people are not curious to learn. There were so many times in lecture that the room was static in response to Prof. Burkert’s questions it isn’t hard to see that many were disengaged. When the issue was raised of students cheating with generative AI like Chat GPT, I was very anxious and saddened as well. I was anxious because of the circumstance of an angry professor and from this irrational fear that I’d cheated too even though I didn’t. I was saddened because it means that AI is changing education. In high school I saw such a depletion in motivation all around me, and including me. There’s something big happening in education, to students and teachers. I don’t know just what it is- and I’d like to research it more. I’m sure it can be attributed to many things like COVID, social media (all the little dopamine addictions really), and drugs but it scares me and makes me sad. I hope to see more people of my generation unite against all this mindless consumption and try to better the world. It all starts with us.