Hello, my name is Austin Moore, I come from the great city of Lapeer Michigan. I am a freshman at Michigan State University studying mechanical engineering. I enjoy playing sports, I will without a doubt beat you in corn hole, yes it is a challenge, I also enjoy spending time with friends and being outside.
While looking through the schedule, I am very excited about week five’s podcasting section. Until this pandemic struck I was not much into podcasts, but I found myself so utterly and unbelievably bored that I decided to see what podcasts are all about. I can definitely say that i was less bored and listening to podcasts made the process of moving houses and constructing a room to live in much easier. I am nervous about the close reading of primary sources, as I have always struggled to fully comprehend the complexity of certain sources. I find it difficult to focus for long enough to be able to accurately identify the underlying meanings within a source.
Before I started to do online learning I had always thought that it was a waste of time and that it was not comparable to traditional school. Now I know that I am only half right, apparently it is quite comparable to regular school, seeing as here we are, amidst a global pandemic doing classes online. Not to be overly critical of online school, but here we are, students and teachers alike, thrown into a half baked online system, riddled with glitches and malfunctions, expected to not only learn all the information as if it were a regular year, but the teachers are expected to teach as if nothing was different. How are we as students, who spent the last 13 years of our lives sitting behind desks and learning, supposed to adapt to an online curriculum both so quickly, and so flawlessly as expected? So many times this year alone, information was not properly transferred to students because of this online curriculum. The blame does not lie with the teachers, students, or any administration for that matter, it is just an unfortunate outcome of the pandemic.
Hi Austin, thank you for your thoughtful post! I am glad to hear that you are looking forward to podcasting week. Podcasts were something that I used to not really care about, but now I really enjoy them! You just have to find the right podcasts for your interests.
I also really appreciate your thoughts about the transition to online, and I completely understand students’ frustrations. I have heard enough stories from students at other universities on social media about unfair assessments, recording test taking, lack of leniency etc. Quite frankly, there are some serious ethical and privacy concerns that some instructors don’t seem to care about, and that’s a huge problem.
My goal in designing this class is really just to learn about history and gain some experience in attempting digital tools. I don’t expect mastery of the tools, because we simply do not have time to perfect these things. If you ever need additional guidance along the way, I am happy to meet via zoom and walk through tutorials again.