I found this class to be a pleasant relief from many other English classes I have completed. I learned a great deal about digital media, and although I could appreciate it at an earlier time, I can now feel like a part of the online creative community. I realize now what I had been missing out on, despite the fact that I consider myself computer-saavy.

I had read many of the stories from this semester before, but removing thoughts from my brain and converting them into pixels turned out to be the most rewarding and challenging part of this course. It seemed many of the stories we read had a lot to do with relationships, often gone awry, and with conflict. This sort of literature makes me realize that good fiction writing takes problems and decisions in life that are often dragged out over days or months, and condenses them into thirty minutes worth of emotion and thought. Short fiction has long been my favorite medium; I've been reading short story collections from Huxley, Poe, Hemingway, Kafka since AP English, and recently some Dostoevsky. I wouldn't have minded some more classical literature, but since the course is geared towards progressive fiction, both in subject matter and in assignments, I think it went very well.

As some have also said, I believe that I am more inclined towards a class with a rigid structure. The podcasting and the open discussion were often very helpful when attempting to understand perspectives throughout the class. Some of my favorite discussions were for A&P, Story of an Hour, Hills Like White Elephants, and The Things They Carried. I found that the online chat within the classroom offered a more anonymous forum for thoughts and reflections. It must be the digital times we live in, but I feel like the class was more willing to contribute from this angle. Perhaps a synopsis of the themes of class literature would have been helpful during the onset of the course; I feel like we sometimes had trouble unifying our discussion because, personally, sometimes I did not know what aspects of a work to concentrate my analysis on.

This class has put me up to date with the time and alternative fiction. I have learned a lot, and thanks to everyone who helped along the way!