Reflecting on Digital Document

As I coming close to the completion of my digital document, I have realized that I have learned a lot about computers that I did not think I could do before. Although it was time consuming, I do not think it was as difficult to do as I imagined.
When I begin this project I started to brainstorm about something that I am learning how to do right now. I came up with skiing (in particular skiing off of some jumps). So the last few times I went skiing, I had my boyfriend take some pictures and videos of me. So I had all of the pictures I needed but I still didn’t know exactly how I wanted to do this.
I thought I was going to want to put all of the pictures in order and then write my narration afterwards. I was wrong! That was definitely not the way to go for me. I didn’t know what order to put the pictures in because I had no idea what I wanted to say. Then, I wrote my narration. Writing the narration was much easier than I thought. I put my pictures in order after writing my narration. That made it much easier for me. The only thing that I had trouble with was importing my videos because my videos were all QuickTime and I didn’t know how to convert them. Luckily, I figured it out after a little searching.
So, where am I now? I have the whole narration written, I have all of my pictures in place, I have half of my narration recorded, and I still have more to do. I still need to record all of my narration, add music, and get the timing for everything set.
All in all, I think I am doing fine. I want to say that I am almost done with my digital document and so far so good!

Learning and Action

After reading Chapters 5 and 6, I started to think about myself and how I learn information the best. I am really good at learning things like sports, games, video games, crafts, songs, math, and so on. I am not very good at learning things like history, science, etc. Everything that I am good at learning is something that you actually do or use. Take sports for instance, I am great at sports. When somebody teaches me a sport, they are not teaching me on paper. They are teaching me outside on the field or court. I am actually watching and doing what is being taught to me. Then, I will use what is being taught to me over and over. It is not something I have to hurry and memorize just to never use it again.
I think that we learn better if we actually use what we are learning. When you play video games, you have to learn how to play and what buttons to press. Then, you will keep using that over and over. Thing that are fun and hands on people tend to learn better because they have to learn it if they want to participate. If the thing that we are trying to learn is something that does not relate to our lives on a regular basis then we tend to just forget about it.
In Chapter 6, Gee talks about the different cultural models. One of the cultural models is about learning. He talks about how learning is driven by goals or particular objectives. For example, personally, I have no interest in history. So a goal of mine would not be to know a lot about history. Therefore, I do not really learn it because I am not interested in it. I am interested in things that I will actually relate to my everyday life.

Situated Learning

As I continue reading this book, I am starting to realize that Gee is making so many different claims. He not only states his own claims, but also claims that other people have made. When I started reading Chapter 4, Gee immediately captured my attention when he "claimed" that the human mind is like a digital computer. I don't really support this claim because I think that there is so much more to the human mind than a computer has to offer. He then goes on to say that "humans learn, think, and solve problems by reflecting on their previously embodied experiences in the world." I completely agree with this statement even though I don't think that at this point Gee has mentioned "situated learning," I think this is kind of what he meant by it. I believe that situated learning can happen anywhere. I think that it can be encouraged by school, sports, hobbies, family life, video games, etc. Later in the chapter Gee claims that video games encourage situated thinking that schools do not. Personally, I don't think that it is fair to say that schools do not encourage situated learning. Even after reading this chapter, I am still a little unclear to what situated learning is exactly. So far my eyes have been opened to many different claims and ideas that I would have never previously pondered. There are many that I agree with and many that I disagree with!