...and so it ends - Week 13: Post Exam & Course Review

"All good things come to an end" - I don’t know who said that but it’s used so much and it’s now quite appropriate.

We had the exam this morning. It was 100 multiple choice questions in 70 mins of which I found to be a lot harder than it sounded. I thought there was a heavy component on communications and media philosophers of whom I didn’t know a great deal about e.g. McLeauan and Aristotle etc and also my worst fear, there was a string of questions based on Allphaville and Primer of which I never saw so those areas I think I struggled. I found that the exam questions were one of two things; either extremely easy or extremely hard, there was no middle ground. Oh well I think I did well enough to pass and my 80% in the essay and HOPEFULLY A GOOD MARK FOR THE BLOG ::nudge nudge:: (sorry capitals=bad netiquette, see Jules I did learn something)

I thoroughly enjoyed this course, most probably because it involved all aspects of which I have a keen interest in i.e. journalism, mass media, new technologies, different aspects of the internet etc. I had no idea it was such an interesting field to study and that there is so much theory based on peoples trends and behaviour in regards to new and evolving technology i.e. cyberpunk, cyber theory and even games theory – who would have thought their was so much involved in video games! The course really opened my eyes to how much the world is changing, how had it is to keep up with it and that we as humans may have our theories and understanding of communications technology, it wont stop the technology taking over us and that it is only a matter of time until we are in fact the end users.

The idea of creating a web blog and using it as a means of recording course activities is a fantastic idea because the people that take the course have an obvious interest in computers and being predominately computer based in both theory and practice makes the subjects a lot more hands on. Also the fact that it is online and interactive means it can be a lot more personal and those with some creative flair like myself can really go to town with interesting pictures, layouts, colours, video etc and create something that their really proud of.

The one minor suggestion I have to improve the course is to make the lecture notes into power point presentation. With the current method you have to read through large slabs of information where the text is quite small. This makes it difficult to identify key points whereas a slide show could show important points, make the text bigger and would look more appealing overall.

In conclusion New Communication Technology was a great course and fantastic stepping stone into Journalism. I plan to do Communications Practice and News and Politics next semester and hope they prove to be as beneficial as this course. Many thanks to Steve and especially Jules for providing help for weekly tasks and making learning fun.

Cheers
MattyC
signing off