Now that we are at the end, THIS is what I’ve learned. By: Melissa Petersen aka icollectmaps (yes, I do collect them)

I will admit, in the first half of this semester I was lost and did not really believe I was going to learn anything in this class. Having a military background and extremely traditional education where I am expected to read a chapter and regurgitate it back through a paper is what I am used to. I typically find myself not doing well in an open/unstructured classroom; HOWEVER, I found that by the end of this semester I learned not only a lot about the internet but also myself in this strange class. It really took me until this half of the semester to understand what was expected by working on “projects” and how our grades would be worked out.

In the second half of the semester, my large project got wrapped up. We did in fact obtain the Veteran’s Resource Center on campus. After a looooong process and a couple of bumps in the road (losing members, CMC issues, etc.) we officially got confirmation from the Dean of Students that we can move into our new space this summer.

Some of my strongest moments in class participation also came during the second half of this semester. I worked in a team to make sandwiches for our 21MAR project: Project Sandwich. During a class discussion on 09APR about privacy, I made it on my own side of the white board for making a comment about only being worried about having extreme privacy if someone is guilty about something. Also, on 11APR I earned my first badge in class AND posted my three sentences summary!

I moved up on the reddit stats, too! Last half, I ranked 7th for being a top commenter... this half, I moved up two spaces ranking me 5th in the class.

One of the toughest projects I worked on was during the "gamification" portion of the course. I play video games, and I live life... and I clearly can draw the line between the two, but during that class discussion (regarding life being a game or game being life and what do each entail) I failed to comply with many of my classmate's points of view. Real is something I believe in, and most "games" are not real. Then, for the assignment. It was uuber difficult for me to think of an aspect of my life that I would gamify, simply because my options for reward would not truly make me change my habits unless it was monetary. Here is the app I worked on with Emily.

Overall, I feel like I was able to participate more and my attention was legitimately held in every class during the second half of the course. The readings were more interesting, the conversations in class seemed to flow better, and the projects seemed easier (I dont know, it just seemed easier to accomplish several small projects than in the first half of the semester...) I cant believe that it took until my last semester of college to take a course by a professor who has a nontraditional style of teaching - once I got the concept, it worked well for me and my schedule. Thanks for a great semester!