English 495 ESM: Multigenre Literacy in a Global Context, what a mouthful. Similar to other people in the class, I had no idea what to expect from it let alone what the name meant as a whole. Even the scope of my expectations faced limitations because I didn't have access to the course Moodle page, which contained the syllabus, for the first week or two. Once I actually got to take a look at the syllabus, the workload seemed a bit overwhelming because it was an area of work, work associated with technology beyond Moodle posts, that I hadn't done before for school. I'd never even attempted to create a blog before. One might say that for the generation I was born in to, I'm a little technologically behind or out of touch.

The blog was the first assignment. For this blog, we were suppose to post a weekly reflection that, preferably pertained to the course, could be on basically anything, at least from my understanding. Unfortunately, between the other assignments, presentations, and essays, that weekly post was frequently forgotten. However, the posting I did do wasn't for naught. It was a really refreshing change to write an essay and be able to insert pictures, video, links, and pretty much any other form of media content available to us; the normal assignments suddenly became an avenue for more than just written creativity.

While I'm on the topic of creativity, the second assignment that was required of us was analyzing a poem (a relatively simple task merely because writing essays are so familiar), and the third creating two unique poems that would also be posted on our blog. This assignment, as I expressed in an earlier post, gave me nothing short of anxiety. I hadn't written a poem of any sort since sixth grade, and even know I don't know how I managed to do that. Even worse, the poems were going to be graded, which in itself put the cherry on top of my apprehension: People, whether familiar to me or not, were going to read and judge something creative I'd done. I don't even like my parents reading my essays despite my having written a countless number of them. To my pleasant surprise though, the poem received a good grade and positive comments, effectually boosting my confidence and willingness to try taking more advantage of this new creative avenue, the blog.

Next, came the first group project, a Collaborative Myth Presentation. For this presentation, each group had to create a presentation in which we explored some aspect illustrated in the myth we chose. My group did the Vietnamese myth about the areca tree and betel nut. Essentially, we used this myth to draw conclusions and do research about the Vietnamese cultural foundations and history. The difficulty of this project was the group aspect. Most of my group members were very competent, but our schedules conflicted a lot, so it was hard corroborating with one another.

The fourth assignment was a Collaborative Media Literacy Presentation, another group project. This project required us to teach a certain grade level a lesson on any topic of our choice as long as it used some form of technology (PowerPoint and Prezi excluded). By this time in my school career, I've developed quite the disdain for group presentations because I often do most if not all the work. This wasn't the case with this group though. Ironically, there were some technological obstacles: Mine and Amber's emails pretty much refused to cooperate with each other. However, it turned out really well because all of our members had no problem doing their part, and despite the bump in communication, our presentation was really fun. Everyone seemed to be really into the type of technology, video games, we decided to use to teach our history lesson on the Civil War.

Aside from this post, our last assignment was the World Text Essay. For this essay, we read some economically and politically inclined journal articles Moodle and then related it to the topic of globalization within the movie Lost in Translation. This essay was actually enjoyable to write about because I'd never seen this movie and I loved seeing some Japanese culture, at least how it is viewed through an American lens.

This class was actually the biggest relief of my chaotic semester. The work was fairly challenging, but not a complete infringement upon the time I needed to complete other assignments in less favorable courses. In addition, there was a distinct, at least in my opinion, for every assignment we were given, I benefited from each assignment in some way. Overall, this course taught me a lot about how so many different kinds of technology can be integrated into education.