Last Week: Class and Reading Reflections

My strongest thought on the readings for this week (which I admit I skimmed through rather quickly) was that they take an appealingly optimistic and can-do attitude towards things that we read about at the beginning of the semester. We started off reading about all the problems with current education, and ended up reading about all the empowered, progressive things people are doing to fix them. How lovely to come full circle and end on that positive note!

Last week's class was brief, and we spent most of our time working on the webinars. I had missed the previous class, in which how to produce a webinar was explained, so I was somewhat adrift when it came to the actual technology, but my group members clued me in fairly quickly. Overall, I enjoyed researching our topic and even had fun putting the presentation together, but I can't help but feel that our topic wasn't an ideal one for the format. There wasn't much we said or did that couldn't have been presented in a lecture or recorded format, with some slides. I envision webinars as being more like the seminars that their name comes from--topics that invite tons of discussion and collaboration, rather than a few people presenting knowledge to many others. On the other hand, being able to present a pre-researched topic, rather than trying to manage a full-blown conversation, was probably a huge blessing for those of us new to the medium--I had more than enough trouble keeping track of the chat frame when I wasn't speaking, I can't imagine trying to do both at once, at least not without a lot more practice.