At the beginning of the semester I went into the class assuming that it would end up like most of the other courses I’ve taken that had class blogs.  And those classes all shared things with ds106 — the openness, sharing, and commenting, the way putting something on the internet where everyone can see it and comment on it makes you feel a lot more invested in the work you’re doing.  It feels a good deal different to me to have a class that’s built around this kind of structure rather than a class where you just turn in the finished product — whether its a paper or a creative project — to the professor and you get it back with a letter written on it, maybe a few comments.  This was mostly how I was thinking about having a personal cyberinfrastructure — that the online component allows for more sharing and more engagement with the work that other people are doing, for more learning all around.

I love this idea for how to do school and I’m thoroughly convinced that more classes should explore having an online space to share work and thoughts with other people in the class.   And even though there are quite a few similarities between ds106 and these other classes I’ve taken which had online blogging components, ds106 has been a thoroughly new, different experience.  I’m sure a lot of this does come from having my own individual space on the internet that can continue if I want it to, rather than just a class blog that inevitably quiets down after the semester ends.  But the biggest difference and most astounding and impressive thing about ds106 for me has been the intense creativity that everyone brings to the class, that there is cool and often inspiring work that I can go check out pretty much everyday.

I appreciate that the class pushes you into many different forms of creativity, makes you work with different media.  I’ve always liked making things, whether photography or painting or whatever, and I approached the first couple of weeks of ds106 (the visual and design work) feeling fairly comfortable.  Audio, video, and remix, on the other hand, are all things I’ve never really messed with before this semester.  It blows my mind a little bit that I know a decent bit about some of the programs used for doing audio and video work now.  And I liked that there was very little instruction on how to use all these programs because I really enjoyed just messing around in GIMP and Photoshop and After Effects trying to figure out what I could do with some crazy and complicated programs.  I may have gotten way too sucked into that part and definitely ended up spending way more time than was ever necessary on a good handful of assignments.  But I have no regrets, and I’m fairly sure I’ll continue using all of these things on whatever future projects may pop into my mind.

I have mixed feelings about some parts of  this class — by the time there were 30 stars of video work I was feeling a bit burnt out about the stars.  And the same thing happened with the Daily Creates, even though I really love the Daily Create and that’s the one part of this class that I feel most likely to continue.   I found that often I wanted to put more time into some assignment for ds106 instead of polishing up this paper or that paper.   And that’s just my personal response to it — it turns out that I like making things a lot more than writing research papers.   Maybe I picked the wrong major?   But it’s cool, and despite the burn-out, I don’t know that I’d really change much about the class.  I would certainly warn future students about how time-consuming it can be — not because it really has to be, but because there’s a good chance you’ll just end up wanting to put more work into the things you’re creating.  But I would still recommend ds106 to anyone and everyone, it’s been a great experience.