For this course, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had an idea of some of the elements that would be involved—for example, website building, hypertext, and minor HTML coding. Other than that, though, I didn’t know what the coursework would look like. As for my own personal goals, I guess that I wanted to strengthen my existing knowledge about interacting with the digital world. This is especially important as more and more of life seems to take place on the internet.
Having taken this course, I’m definitely more aware about how digital publishing works. For example, I had previously discussed remixes in another class, but this course really made me think about how my own work could be reused or recirculated. That kind of knowledge definitely makes you think twice before you post something online! So, overall, I’d say that before this class, I thought about other people’s work when it came to digital publishing—now, I’m much more focused on and aware of my own.
As a side note, I’ve been meaning to start a film review blog for a while, so the things I learned in this class will definitely be useful for that!
My biggest takeaway from this class was my understanding of audience. Before this course, I had only thought of audience in simple terms—academic versus casual, or native English-speakers versus people who speak English as a second language. This course definitely expanded my understanding of just how complex “audience” can be, and the fact that the course always asked me to consider audience so carefully was definitely useful. My future career (I’m hoping to go into civil rights law) is certainly going to involve a lot of arguing/persuading, so it will be extremely useful that I have an increased awareness of audience.
I can’t think of much I would change about this course. I’m technically an English Literature major, so I maybe would have liked a few more references/topics that I understood—not being a Publishing and Editing student, I didn’t really have a background in publishing concepts, which sometimes made it hard to connect to the material. Since this class is mostly for publishing people, though, I’m not sure if this suggestion is relevant or doable.