15. Course Reflection

When I signed up for this course, my expectations were quite broad. I’m not generally one to focusing on expectations, but there were definitely subconscious ones. I found myself assuming that the class would be extremely tech-heavy, which it was, and that there would be a lot of reading, which there was. I also hoped that we would learn about the utilization of social media and public interaction with digitally published texts. We didn’t spend as much time on that as I thought we would, and the coursework felt a bit closed off from the world in that we were the only people consuming each other’s work, and didn’t really study more professional work close-up. However, we did spend a lot of time on the history of digital publishing and platforms, which was good, and I enjoyed it.

My biggest takeaway from the class is definitely that digital publishing is so much more massively complex and webbed than I had originally thought. It surpasses the limits of platform and can be spread across so many (depending upon the text.)

I really wanted to interact with a more public sphere. I had hoped we might learn some things that were closer related to mainstream media, like the composition of tweets on Twitter, or blog posts on Tumblr. I wanted to focus more on software and less on theory, maybe with projects that were smaller and took less time, but more frequent. I think the projects felt too big for a class like this; I wanted to focus more on the little things and practical skills, maybe software tutorials.