Ryan Gaboury
English 110 C
Reflection
My first impressions of our own personal ePortfolio was, at first, a bit hesitant and different from other resources I had used prior to arriving at UNE. I had never used a Digispace, one where we could create posts and allow for other people to observe your writing from its rough copies through the final product. Creating a website solely on your writing and designing a piece that will be shown to anyone willing to put time into reading a writing assignment was at times odd. I call this “odd” since I was never really the one to show off my work or have other people divulge into my personal writing and ideas. Writing with passion is, at times, embarrassing or controversial to some in which I am the least interested in creating a situation on conflicting ideas or opinions. Equally important, the ePortfolio’s potential is extremely expansive in a sense that we as students can open our writing ideas or opinions into the world, not just within an assignment for a Professor or the class. With this, people can learn more about you as a person as well as what important assignments or world issues are being taught and argued within a college environment. As I started to play around with the themes and other mechanics within the system, I began realizing that it was exciting to create something of your own where millions of people on the interest could search for your specific blog. Researching for a potential background picture or what would be the first assignment or thing uploaded onto the site gave me a sense of enjoyment out of something so little. I personally never see a downside on anything until it proves me otherwise and this Digispace platform has only shown the extreme positives that it does for our classroom and writing techniques. Pen and paper may have been the way to study or bounce ideas off of each other in the past, but technology and computers today have allowed us to do the same and more just as beneficial and successful as before. Focus is a key contributor to this issue though, since the negative of using an online resource such as ePortfolio is that distractions and other factors can deter you from completing something faster than we realize at times.
Praising the ePortfolio may come as a huge surprise coming from someone who isn’t the largest ambassador of digital technology in the classroom prior to being at UNE. During my time in high school, we as students received a Chromebook through a high school program. I believed it was the biggest waste of time and useless thing I could have used for learning. It was only meant to be a distraction, used more for games than school purposes and the school never did anything to prevent students from doing these non-productive things. I rarely used it because I knew that I would only succumb to everyone else enjoying their time watching Netflix or playing on Addicting Games sooner or later. I would lack focus and in turn, lead to the worst grades during my time in high school. Learning from that experience, I have now allowed technology to grow on me and no longer let myself get distracted while doing assignments that were due. Having a straight-edge mentality already, I am hard on myself when I fail to complete tasks or fail to have the want to do them. Focus and discipline is an important factor in learning this, yet it is still a work in progress and using Digispace will allow me to continue to get better at using technology for the correct educational purposes.
