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As I entered the classroom of Room 108 Smith Hall for my summer class, I had mixed feelings. First of all I really wanted to take a break over the summer from having the everyday weight on my shoulders of making sure I was understanding, participating, learning, sharing information like you do in every college class. However, I also felt that when you leave the classroom and discontinue that everyday practice of writing, reading and learning, you take a chance of losing that momentum. So actually, I didn't know what to expect from this class. What I did know was that it would involve computers. I also knew it would probably have a special twist to the process of learning the information as I had experienced when taking classes through Mrs. Mccomas.

By the end of the class the first day, I had played around with the library computers accompanied by the instructions of a librarian there. I had learned how to go about researching within the databases the library offered. But, just to let you know, I also learned that day, we were not going to meet like a regular class. Now this made my concerns of a missed out break period a little less severe. We were going to have one class a week where we met in an assigned classroom on the internet. We were instructed to keep in contact via a group e-mail account and we created weblogs where our assignments could be posted for grading and viewing purposes. This was all knew to me. I received my instructions for the class and I was out the door.

As I embarked on this new style of classroom setup for the first week, I ran into quite a few obstacles.
First of all, I am not very computer literate. This was the largest hurdle to get over. In the past, I have used my computer for the purpose of emailing and typing papers. The computer has so many other facets. It is an outlet to pull a lot of information to your fingertips. I changed my perspective on using the computer. This class transformed me from holding back on the computer world. I began to take chances on looking at different websites and exploring the possibilities the internet offered. It became quite time consuming for me because I found time easily passing by as looked from website to website. So basically this class became a lot more intriguing. I was anxious to learn this new process.

Secondly, the first part of the semester we spent time reflecting on our learning history and learning values. This required me to remember some of the reasons for choices I made about my educational career. Some of which I am not very proud of but in retrospect I can also see that choices are based sometimes on where you are physically and emotionally at that point in your life. I felt that I was actually writing a journal that helped me process those decisions. We also were reading articles and creating prompts on inquiry and literacy and information literacy ( a new word to my vocabulary). It was interesting to learn the needs for this new introduction to information. I grew up in a time when computers were not this advanced and most research was done out of an encyclopedia book that was created maybe four years before the day I read it. Libraries were just not able to keep up with growing outcome of new information. So this new information literacy concept became just an amazing phenomenon to me.

The next obstacle started when we had to decide on an essential question for our multigenre project. This multigenre project was going to include six genres, three of which would be a poem, webliography and a powerpoint presentation. The decision of choosing an essential question, I realize now requires a lot of breaking down. You need to begin with one large question and let yourself sort of pick it apart so that you can focus on one aspect of that question. The purpose was for us to find an answer, and I emphasize an answer to our question. I believe this is to make sure that we realize when we are researching a topic we are finding one solution, one possibility based on our opinion but there are others out there. I found this difficult because I couldn't decide what information I found was the most important to report. I ended up choosing a subject I found the most interesting to me at this point in my life and hopefully interesting to my audience. It was a personal choice for me because it gave me an opportunity to find out information I needed to know for my own personal benefit. The best part was that I could do that and share it with hopefully people who may be experiencing the same situation by posting the information to this weblog. So the class began to take a different turn at that point. I was hunting and gathering with all the skills I had learned in the beginning of class and slowly creating this project that allowed me to express myself emotionally and include factual information. It has turned out to be quite fulfilling.

I would like to share the experience I had with the process of this project. Once you got your essential question and you decided on the foundation questions the next move was to research your topic. Equipped with the skills we had learned, I moved into that process of the project. I realized the difficult part of this was being critical of the information I found. Anyone can just print information on the internet. You must be careful to scrutinize what you find and protect yourself from false information. It takes a lot of time and a lot of cross examination. But once you have the information, things begin to take shape. I plucked and typed for about the next two weeks. The best part of using different genres was that it gave you an opportunity to be creative and to show the information from a couple different perspectives. I loved this. It wasn't boring. I created a newsletter, a poem, a webliography, editorial, an interview and the best of all was the powerpoint project. I had never done a powerpoint project. This new expression of information was just enlightening. The only disappointment came when I couldn't add music to my powerpoint. I was introduced to copyright laws. As much as you want to say who is really going to view this work that would actually take the time to contact me and convict me of illegally stealing their music. I read enough information to scare me into making the decision not to do this. This was a learning experience. I found out it can happen. I found other ways of being creative like adding pictures and colors etc. Soon I forgot about that disappointment.

As I look back now, I am thrilled that I took this class over the summer. All of those concerns of missing out on a opportunity to take a break from learning are gone. I learned so much. I think my concern now is letting go of the creation of the project. It's just hard to give up. From what I have heard I can continue to make it a ongoing interest in my life because antville.org, where our weblogs were created, will hopefully be around for a while. As long as they are around my weblog will be around. I can only hope that other classes will be influenced to complete projects like this for research. I will encourage and always share my experience of this class with other classmates and educators.

I would like to thank my classmates in CD315 for their encouragement and willingness to share their own experiences as we all embarked on the development of our Multigenre Projects. I would like to especially thanks Lekei Tolliver for continuously allowing me to put our heads together to sort out details of our assignments. I would like to thank Mrs. Mccomas for putting together a class that involved a new type of expression of research information rather than the traditional college research paper and allowing me to gain more knowledge about information literacy. I would also like to thank the people involved in the writing and research of educating caregivers on issues of dementia and aphasia. I am glad to see other people can sympathize with the need for communication compensation strategies as well as overall understanding of the disease and its impact on the caregiver patient relationship.