Class 1: Reflection

Lamar University Digital Learning and Leading 5302-D01!!!

This has been my first ever online class, and it has been... interesting. I do not have my Masters degree, but I have started three other grad school programs in education. Because of that, a lot of the academic concepts are similar to what I have learned in the past, but this time around, there are no face-to-face interactions with other people. This cohort is also different than I have been around. There seem to be A LOT of people in this section and much more experienced educators: y'all use some big words! What I miss about an in-person cohort is the impromptu karaoke after Thursday class, and the mocking of each other and the professors during group sessions. But actually, the face-to-face group sessions helped me to be able to talk about and build projects or discussions about what we are doing. That all helped me dig deeper into what we were learning. I have a more difficult time contributing and comprehending as much on the reading and writing based discussion board. Reading and writing is not my strength, so I guess it is a good thing that I have to do it and get better at it now.

One positive of the online discussion board (outside of the topics being learned) is that there seems to be less tom foolery, and you get straight to work. You don't have to wait for Amelia to finish her crazy story about the weekend before you can start the class project. Interesting to me though is there seems to be a lot less disagreement on the academic online board. You do see different opinions, but not as many people outwardly disagree with ideas. Whereas on anonymous social media discussions, people can be so mean, rude,

disrespectful, blatantly discriminatory, etc. In person, when you have a disagreement, you can say it gently or with a raised forehead so you can be critical and nice at the same time; it is not as easy to do textually. You can still do it, but you do lose body language and tone, as parodied on the Key & Peele skit to the right. Beware: strong language and drug references, thank you.

After week two of the class, I had some negative feelings. I didn't want to post on the discussion board. We all just put our own separate thoughts which were for the most part the same thoughts, just worded differently. Then there were two replies below the post (or four if you were lucky) saying that they like the post, and that this or that was interesting; add link and citation. I wasn't about that life.

I initially received a terrible grade on my first assignment. My reaction was that I wanted to see if the classes "not yet" principle was going to be practiced. It was, but it also made me look back and think of the feeling of getting the poor grade and deflecting that on a lot of adolescents these days. A lot of middle and high school students that I have seen would just give up and stop working. I was taken aback because I thought I received a much lower grade relative to the work I thought I put in. I received straight zeros on my rubric! So a whirlwind of thoughts went through my head. Are "they" doing this to teach me the lesson of failing as a learning moment? If so, was giving straight zeros dismissive: it's like giving all 10's on a Likert scale assessment: did you actually put any thought into it? If I was a millennial adolescent, would I just have packed my bags?

Tha Aha Moment

Being a cynic, my "aha" moments were more like "well maybe" moments. Well maybe "they" did this right, knowing that I would learn how it feels to receive all zeros. Well maybe I am learning a lot by having to read and write, because I do not like to read a write (which is also funny because well maybe I should rethink getting a degree in education then). Well maybe I learned that I need to be better at expanding on my thoughts on papers and projects. Well maybe the discussion boards are a good thing, because it is a way to practice the COVA model on a fully online class. And in sticking to my word and beliefs as alluded to in my learning manifesto (A MUST READ), education is about the experience of the lesson; the lesson itself is just the seasoning. Well maybe I got a lot out of this class...

Work Cited

Key, K., Peele, J. (2014). Key & Peele - Text Message Confusion - Uncensored. YouTube. Retrieved From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naleynXS7yo.