Digital Storytelling

Reflection Two

As the semester progresses, I am feeling more confident with using Scalar, and digital storytelling in general. At first, I was very intimidated by Scalar, but as I play around with it and practice using it more, I am getting the hang of it. Uploading new content has almost become like muscle-memory to me. That is not to say that I feel entirely confident with using Scalar, but I am learning to embrace experimenting with it. I have found it really helpful to watch YouTube video tutorials to help me whenever I am feeling stuck with it. As the semester progresses, I want to get more comfortable with uploading images and making my e-portfolio more unique to me and my digital story.

So far, I am feeling the most hesitant toward creating an interactive map. However, I am acknowledging that this is how I felt before creating my timeline. Once I had created my timeline, the feeling was actually very rewarding, because I had never created something like that for one of my classes before. For my digital story, I think that creating a map would be a very useful and fascinating way for me to share some of my research. In the next two weeks I am planning on conducting the bulk of my research. I am starting to devise a plan, form questions, and have ideas for what images I would like to incorporate into my digital story. I am excited to conduct the research because that is something that I am comfortable with, but I am nervous about the act of actually creating the digital story; it feels overwhelming to me.

This class has definitely been out of my comfort zone, but I am happy that I am taking it. It is my last semester here at UMBC, and I am happy that I decided to take the leap, push myself, and take something that was so unfamiliar to me. I honestly feel less motivated in all of my classes in general, which I suppose people warned me of with “senioritis.” That is one of the many reasons I am happy I chose to take this class though; we have such a democratic classroom environment which makes me significantly less anxious. I feel as though I am more motivated to focus on the learning tools, while also gaining a true understanding of how others have used similar tools in their own research. In past classes I felt so much pressure to memorize our reading materials, and concepts used, and I do not feel like that about this class. I feel like our weekly readings/videos, etc. are provided to help us understand how versatile the tools we’re learning about really are. 

So, my digital literacy has definitely improved, but there is still a lot of room for improvement here. Sharing our e-portfolios on Scalar has been comforting (for lack of a better term) to me. Sometimes I feel hesitant about my work or am feeling unsure about whether I did it right or not. Instead of feeling like I have nowhere to turn to, I explore my classmates e-portfolios on Scalar, which has been very reassuring. I am aware that my e-portfolio is the biggest portion of my grade, so I would like to continue getting more comfortable with all of the tools on Scalar.