Kelley Class Recap

When I talked to students that had taken this class before, the one thing they told me was that this was going to be one of the most demanding journalism classes in terms of workload and deadlines but would also be the most beneficial and most rewarding when completed. They were right. Although there were many projects throughout the semester, as well as the curation assignment, I realized that I probably learned the most from this class in comparison to any other journalism class so far. Learning about multimedia sites like Timeline, Piktochart, Soundcloud, etc. definitely will help me with my career. I don't know how many journalism students from other schools can say they got to use Google Glass and create video projects with the device. I think that was one of my favorite parts of the class- learning how to use Google Glass, because in reality I probably would never have gotten to experience Glass if I didn't take this class. 

Although I am not 100 percent of what type of journalism career I will pursue, I do enjoy magazine writing and social media. I think learning how to code is really important and although Code Academy took me over 8 hours to complete, it was definitely worth it. Many business and engineering students learn to code at Lehigh, so the fact that we journalism students also got to learn was really exciting. I think the video editing and projects were really important as well because it allowed me to step out of my comfort zone. I had to talk to people I never met and film them, and although it was a bit uncomfortable at first, I learned a lot. Recording them and asking them questions actually helped me with my Journalism 298 class (writing for the media II). Between that class and this one I definitely learned a lot in terms of interviewing and deadlines. 

 I think one of the hardest parts of this class, at least for me, was the curation assignment. The actual assignment itself, tweeting, blogging, participating in an online community, wasn't the hard part, but doing all three each week at certain times was difficult. This was definitely one of the most demanding parts of the class, and although I didn't start out the assignment too great, I think I learned how to handle the tweeting twice a day, blogging twice a week and writing in the Reddit community. There were times when I would be getting ready for bed and think "shoot, did I tweet twice today?" After experiencing this I realized that Tweet Deck and setting times for tweets to go out was the move. This made things a lot easier because I could set a tweet to be sent out two days from when I created it, which was nice. 

The curation assignment was definitely a learning experience. My tweets weren't great at first, but I learned and ended up finally catching on, on how to make a newsworthy tweet, I even got some publicity from people I've never met. I ended up gaining followers and from big company's like the verified McDonald's twitter account. They actually retweeted and responded to my tweets a number of times which I thought was pretty cool. I do wish my blog got a little bit more publicity or views, but I am happy that I was able to create a professional website. In terms of the online community, that was probably my least favorite. Although there were some interesting posts from people and although I got responses on my posts, my subreddit community had millions of people participating, so it was kind of tricky to have many people view my posts and comment or share them. Overall, the curation assignment was an interesting experience, and I can see why the assignment is included in the syllabus.

Although stressful at times, I thought this was a really interesting and important class. I learned a lot about multimedia storytelling and I am really happy I took this class. I would definitely recommend other journalism students to take Jour 230.... but maybe not this class and Jour 298 in the same semester!!