LIS Reflection

     When I searched "hybrid/blended classes" on Google, the first link to appear was from UW-Milwaukee. These classes were very similar to our LIS class. Their main point of differentiation was that the Milwaukee courses used online interaction to replace a portion of their classroom face-to-face time, whereas our online work is in addition to our time spent in lecture and discussion.

     In terms of my experience with this course, I feel that our online portions connected to our discussions in our discussion sections, however I sometimes struggled to find the connection between our online portions and some of the articles we read. I do believe that the online portions did help me to become better acquainted with my classmates though because I was able to learn more about them through their writing about themselves. That is because many of the assigned blog posts required more in-depth responses than would be covered in a typical conversation in the short time spent together during discussion section. I am also more confident in my ability to use blogs and wikis--I just recently used blogger to create a final project for another one of my classes this semester.

     The course lectures and readings were helpful to my understanding of the information society, however some readings were more relevant I felt, and more helpful, than others. Overall, I enjoyed both our online activities and our classroom time spent together. Although, I believe that in some scenarios the in person time is more beneficial than virtual time because the internet cannot successfully replicate the atmosphere of our discussion sections.