When I assigned up for the course ILT5430 Learning with Digital Story earlier this year, I was not expecting this type of learning at all. The last eight weeks has been the most intensive yet rewarding ILT course I have taken.There are so much to say about this course that I am afraid that I would be able to cover everything.

Me as a learner in this course.

Like much of professional development and learning there needs to be outreach and networking opportunities in order to maximize growth and understanding. Self-directed learning doesn’t have to be isolated, nor should it be. Learning communities are connected by common interest, practice and goals. For online learners, creating these connections can be challenging. I think that as online learning environments become more prevalent, however, the idea of self-directed yet connected learning will become more normal.

My co-design in this course.

I really liked that each week( except the last week) we are following a same pattern of class activities. Since the course has been so intensive and radically fast, it is nice to know there are something stable. The similar pattern helped me greatly in time management so I can get things done in a limited time. If I were given a chance to change something in this course. I would have get rid of some of the story critiques assignments. It was kind tiresome to use the same standards to critique over and over again. Also I feel the weekly summary is not that necessary, considering all our work has been posted on blogs or Twitters, it should be easy to track how well did everyone finish their tasks.

My understanding of pedagogy.

This eight-week-learning experience was just like putting puzzle together. At first, I was almost paralyzed to read the long list of assignments whose due dates is each Thursday, Friday and Sunday. I thought the workload was a bit over the top. DS106 Daily Creates didn’t make sense to me either. Most of the Daily Creates tasks sounds silly to me, such as making a shadow of yourself, creating a colorful cow…And creating a Twitter account? I am not a social network type of person! But now after eight weeks, I understood the reasons behind the class design. Every puzzle is in its place now. DS106 assignments provided me countless recourses for storytelling. I was able to find examples, instructions and topics to create my own digital stories. The focal theme helped me to find out what really is my interest. I am passionate to work on the projects because I am the one to chose these topics.   Hypothsis.is annotation is so cool. It really transformed a reading task into a live discussion with my peers. I have to admit that it is much more fun to read other’s annotation than the required reading itself. It has deepened my understanding to some abstract concepts from the book and inspired me for writing each week’s reading response. Story critique for myself and other classmates helped me to understand what it takes to tell a good digital story. It certainly made me a better storyteller by not repeating some of the down sides of the video I have critiqued.

When I create thefinal portfolio, I am so proud myself being able to pull off everything. Thank you, Remi and Lisa , for designing various meaningful class activities, for giving us freedom to chose our focal theme, for the “no news is good news” grading system, for organizing the live flash annotation, for believing us and pushing us forward…The list could go on and on.  I will definitely try this “learning through doing within community” pedagogy in my class this fall.