Final Reflection

During this class we have covered a lot more than I thought we would, with each week bringing something entirely new to the table. We covered things such as the beginnings of multimedia, social networking, webware, open source, animation, video and even the transformation of the Internet itself. Each of these things were demonstrated to us via our discussion, reading and most of all our projects. All of which gave me a much broader perspective of how much power there is behind all of these tools that the user can easily grasp, making this class very worthwhile to me.
I organized my portfolio by Social Networking, Weekly Work and Discussion, Other Tools and Projects because those seemed like the logical categories that the work we did as well as the flow of the class took. For me it would start out with what the weekly work was and what the discussion questions were to keep in mind while I did the reading and assignments. We would then use various tools to help us accomplish our tasks for the week. Some weeks involved more in-depth projects that all of the previous helped develop. Then our assignments would also involve some sort of social networking, whether it be setting up a profile or making sure that we blogged the process of our work for others to view and comment on. So therefore I put a short description of the class work for each week along with it's discussion, my links to any of the social networking involved in another section, and the tools I used to get my work done and the links to my projects in each of their own respective sections of my ePortfolio site.
Yet even though each week covered a different topic than the last, I really liked the class because each week still built on top of the last in one way or another. For example tools that we were introduced to one week became useful later on in other assignments. Mindmapping was a tool one week that we learned in-depth about with it's relation to multimedia. It then became a great tool to help us coordinate our thoughts and help creativity flow for other assignments and projects. I believe this flow of being able to build on what was done the week before was one of my strengths in this class. For example I thought some of my best work came out of transferring and evolving my twitter theme between different forms of media. They were all basically the same with minor tweaks to the story each time, but executed differently. The storyboard for the first animation laid out a good foundation for both my animation and my video. The FATP helped me maintain my focus for each as well. With each one I was able to adapt the settings available to me, whether that was one of the pre-defined scenes that limited me on the animation, or the town that that I live in and the people I had available to me at the time.
The most effective techniques for creating my projects had to be the FATP as well as using the flowcharts. I liked using the FATP because sometimes when I am creating things I can go off on a tangent of ideas and eventually stray if I do not keep focused. The FATP helped me stay on task on many occasions helping me achieve my original vision while keeping in the confines of the assignment. The flowcharts helped strengthen those aspects of the FATP because it would help me visualize my assignments in steps and give me a solid path to follow.
I would say one of the most difficult challenges of the portfolio was adapting it to the extended requirements from that over the old one. I already had something that worked so I didn't want to change the site too much or start over, so I had to think about what I could instead add to the site to make it work. I overcame this challenge by stepping back and trying to think about this class as a whole and then seeing if I could see any connections. As you can see in the way my site is set up like I mentioned before, I organized it by how I saw the class flowed which I think worked out quite nicely as it helped me fit things nicely into categories.
Overall this class was a worthwhile experience for me. The ePortfolio helped me really see how all of what I had learned connected to each other and this class has really changed the way I look at the internet. I see it much less in the web 1.0 view of when I first started using the Internet and instead see how empowering it can be too the user, with all the tools it offers the possibilities for creativity seem endless and so are the ways you can share it! Also the most important thing I got out of this was that the Internet is not just the product of developers, but largely by the end user. We are the Internet.

Here is the link to my ePortfolio: http://sites.google.com/site/carmenseportfoliosite/Home