For my assignment, I chose to respond to the article Digital Ghosts in the Classroom by Ashley Hinck. In the article, the author talks about how she is a teacher in a technology class and how students are afraid to fail. She explains that this is because popular template programs are easy to use and present little to no risk of failure. In her class students do coding, meaning producing a “working product” at the end is a huge success. She identifies that a student’s believe digital media making is simply a series of linear steps, with a guaranteed working product at the end, which is not the case. Her class also required students to code their projects in HTML, I can only imagine how steep of a learning curve that would be. Hinck presents her theories on modern education in the article, describing how she believes students entire education is like a template platform; a student performs a series of designed steps, produces a correct answer, and has no risk of failure. I believe she is onto something with that school of thought, you can apply that model of thinking to nearly any course and it is accurate. Here is the link to the article: http://hybridpedagogy.org/digital-ghosts-modern-classroom/
I can relate to this “comfortable path” as I almost chose to do a PowerPoint for this assignment, however, I stepped out of my comfort zone and was able to do a SketchNote. I really enjoyed the process of thinking out how I wanted the final product to look, and figuring out how to illustrate key points in the article. I chose to do the SketchNote because I have never tried anything like this before and thought it would be a good way to experience a new medium. Overall, the learning curve was steep, I had to think about the article in a way that was different from just putting the information summarized into a PowerPoint, but I think I managed to produce something effective in learning. My experience creating the artifact related greatly to the text from the article because I was required to think of the information in a creative way. Hinck says “digital making is not a series of linear steps” as I was working on my SketchNote, I realized how true that is; I often changed my mind and had new ideas pop into my head that ended up altering the final product from how I originally envisioned it. Lastly, in using this medium I found a clear connection to teaching and learning as I continued to create new ideas for my SketchNote, I found the material from the text made more sense to me and deepened my understanding on the topic.
Also, sorry everyone this is sideways.. I have rotated it multiple times and it never stays in landscape mode when I save it.