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While I knew a lot about computers and different web tools coming into this course, taking it has exposed me to more technology and helped me look at new media in a new way. At the beginning of the course I thought of digital writing mostly as blogs, and maybe things like Wikipedia or internet forums. By the end, though, that definition expanded to include games, photography, and even text messages—just about anything that’s created or presented in a digital space. Throughout the course, we worked on a number of course outcomes—the social skills presented in the article we read at the beginning of the semester:

Play —the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving. We developed this skill in just about every assignment we were given, because each one involved using technology that at least some of us hadn’t used before. Being exposed to something new meant we had to play around with it, to see what everything did before we could do the work we needed to.

Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery. To some extent, this happened when we read scholarly articles about digital writing. We each had to take on the role of scholar and analyze just what each article was saying. For me, at least, it was also developed when writing in authoritative terms about digital writing, especially about the articles but also in the wiki for Project 1.

Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes. This was mostly developed in Project 3, where we created multiple different resumes and a LinkedIn profile to get us thinking about how to approach our online professional identities. By doing a little homework, we learned about how our chosen fields of interest work.

Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content. We developed this skill in just about every project, but most of Project 2 was devoted to appropriation. For that project, we learned about Creative Commons licenses and used Creative Commons images to create our own image for the audio postcard.

Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details. For me, this was whenever I wasn’t recording some audio. Even as I write this, I have five tabs open in my web browser, switching between them to check on something or skip to a different song as necessary.

Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities. As I was learning to use new software like the wiki program for Project 1 or GIMP for Project 2, I was looking things up on the internet or taking some notes in a plain-text document to refer to later. The ability to use powerful tools like search engines and databases increases a person’s productivity immensely—without them, I would have had to take all my own photographs for Project 2, for example.

Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal. We saw this primarily with Project 1, where we all worked on the same class wiki. From the very beginning, we approached it with different bodies of knowledge to contribute and built it from the ground up.

Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources. I think the best example of this for the class is the Diigo bookmarking assignment, where we had to find different web pages relevant to the topic at hand and decide whether they were worth sharing with the class.

Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities. We did this throughout the course as a whole, keeping track of these course outcomes and the way that digital writing is used and discussed as we were exposed to more and more of it.

Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information. This sort of relates to distributed cognition and judgment above; between Project 1 and the bookmarking assignment we had to collect a great deal of information and share it with our classmates.

Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms. Our group meeting for Project 1 was an exercise in negotiation, as we were all approaching it from different angles and we had to figure each other out in order to get anything done.

The outcomes I engaged with most were play and distributed cognition. I played with just about everything we did in this course. The key concept in play is experimentation in a low-stress environment; by playing with something new, you can make as many mistakes as you want without any real consequences and still learn. I played with WordPress to create this blog, the wiki software for Project 1, and GIMP and iMovie in Project 2. Throughout the whole course, I found myself using search engines and other digital tools not only to find things on the internet, but also to put them together in a coherent fashion. My posts would look awful without WordPress’ tools for inserting images and formatting text, for example.

In the future I’d like to learn more about simulation. I want to go into the video game industry, and every game has some degree of simulation in it somewhere, but I only know some general information about simulations. Physics engines, for example, are complex programs that keep track of many different objects in a simulation and direct their behavior based on Newtonian physics in the real world. I’d also like to learn some more about collective intelligence, especially relating to wiki software. I know how our class’ wiki project went, but I want to know how it works for other people and how it works for bigger projects like Wikipedia.

At the beginning of this course, I really thought of “digital writing” and “multimedia” as different things; digital writing was confined to text and multimedia might include text, audio, video, and still images. To some extent, the two are different—something can use multiple forms of media and stay entirely out of the digital realm—but there is a great deal of overlap between them today. In a sense, anything that is digital can be considered a form of writing, from user-level down to the binary data read and written by the computer. Thinking about things that way, connecting them at every level and relating them to one another, has made me more ‘educated’ in that it encourages me to think more than I normally would about a given subject. Looking for connections between things, especially things that seem unrelated at first, can often help you see them in completely different ways and understand them more thoroughly.