Early Weeks of LLWW
Have you ever been told you have to complete a task but not see the point or value in it? This was definitely my case when I was enrolling in my units for the Autumn 2020 Session. After coming across Living Learning and Working on the Web and finding it to be an online-only unit, my expectations dropped significantly. “How would this unit benefit me?” and “How am I able to ask questions about learning material?” were some of the first questions that came to mind. Also being me (Anthony, by the way), a current undergraduate student completing a bachelor’s degree in Cyber Security and Behaviour at Western Sydney University, it was required that this unit be completed in order to graduate after 3 full years of study.
I remember telling myself that this unit was going to be a complete waste of time and an easy way to bludge without the need to apply any actual effort (Demonstrated by my first post in the LLWW Facebook group), but this opinion was to change in the next few coming weeks as I soon began to realize how and what this unit genuinely had to offer. The unit was able to help demonstrate a range of things, some of which consisted of:
– How somebody could work professionally online using various social media platforms and websites
– How a group of people are able to successfully interact and work together in an online working environment
– The importance of various topics which relate to people’s everyday lives and how they can affect everyone (Sometimes without them even knowing)
Delving Deeper
One of the first things that struck out when I was first reading material about the unit was its required use of Facebook. It was to be our primary contact method when communicating which other students and even our teacher’s, which was weird considering how every other unit was on campus with the main communication methods being face-to-face. Of course, my original opinion was fast to change once we began working throughout the semester, I found it much more convenient that class was to be held when I wanted, without having to go into campus and not to forget that questions could be simply asked with a few keystrokes at any time during any day. The unit furthered this by demonstrating how anybody could create a professional online working environment where you would be able to communicate your voices and opinions while also allowing others to view, interpret and respond via comments and even emailing’s. This was achieved through the use of a preferred blogging site, wordpress.com in my case (Visit here), where I was able to voice my opinion on topics of choice. The unit helped develop our writing methods and demonstrated various ways different things could be done. For example, we learnt to make more engaging writing by incorporating external sites and recourses used, directly into our text rather than creating a reference list and using in-text citations (Demonstrated here and here). We were also introduced to the idea of ‘feed-forward’ which involved submitting work earlier than required, allowing fellow students to read and comment in-order to further our writing to help improve our first copies. The idea of feed-forward is further explained here, which addresses its benefits over traditional feedback methods and touches reasons normal feedback is not so useful in comparison to feedforward.
Secondly, before completing this unit the tasks of group assignments and working with other students seemed daunting. It was always easy to worry if the other students in your group were keeping up with their section of work and in the end finding out once it would be too late. This was partly reasoned by only being able to have strong contact with each other once a week, during face-to-face time in tutorials, something this unit didn’t have. This forced group members to find alternate methods of communication such as messenger or discord and enabled us to work at our own pace and update each other live as we worked through the assignment. This also led to students developing new skills with different types of applications such as Google Doc’s (Here you can view our group campaign report) and Photoshop, therefore increasing our knowledge while even helping with future employability (Here are some traits which employers look for, E.g. Teamwork and ability with different suite’s such as Adobe or Microsoft Office).
Finally, before undertaking this unit I was uninterested in many topics circulating the web and even on the news, I just never seen the reason to pay it any attention as I believed most of it didn’t really concern me. LLWW also managed to change this outlook of mine and further develop my ability to interpret, understand and engage in such contents due to the weekly blog post topics which were given to us. Each one seemed to highlight something new while keeping things fresh and allowing me to gain insight into many challenging factors the world currently faces as we develop into a more digitalized society. Examples of such topics can be Surveillance and the privacy paradox or Information and Knowledge with filter bubbles deciding upon what we see while being online without our knowledge or consent (More on this topic here).
To Summarise
To quickly concluding my experiences, I would say I entered this unit without expecting anything in return, but to my surprise, it ended up providing me with a lot more than most of my other units. Living Learning and Working on the Web helped develop my mindset and increased my knowledge in many various aspects of life and in turn helped increase my employability skills while also demonstrating the importance of keeping up with current world challenges. This unit was also able to help me construct a professional online profile and working environment while also developing my communication and writing skills among many others.
Anthony's Blog 