Time flies. I am writing the final blog post for the most exciting class. What a great experience it has been in this class!

I want to thank Professor Ryan for being so helpful. We need more teachers like him because he has the most beneficial teaching style.

“Digital Storytelling” class took me through a journey I was nervous about because of obvious reasons. As I have mentioned a few times before, I am not tech-savvy at all. But I enjoyed learning little technological skills in this class. I fell in love with making GIFs. CT 101 made me realize that the internet is a platform of unlimited opportunities specially if you have a creative mindset. Starting from making GIFs, memes to customizing my personal website- I didn’t see myself here before taking this class. The purpose of this class was to expand our creativity even a little with each assignment. The professor encouraged us to express our creative minds on each blog post. We were encouraged to use the vast options out there on the internet to be creative, imaginative, and expressive about them. Reading several articles in CT 101 taught me that communicating using GIFs, memes in the digital world is not only the way of having fun with friends, but it means a lot to some people out there because they are so passionate about it that they made a career out of it. I enjoyed learning about these people who do what they love to do. In a way, they are communicating to the world the message that we all should learn more about what interests us.

I am not so confident about receiving an A in this class. I have completed the assignments on time but I doubt if they consisted of high-quality creative outputs. Creativity, Perception, Intuition, Imagination are amazing things to possess. I have all the other three except digital creativity. Being bad at both technology, and digital art- makes me less confident about receiving an A in this class. I express my creative thinking, my perception, imagination in my writing. The website that I have created, is based on my writing content. I have done my best in this class by following instructions, watching Professor’s tutorials to complete each assignment. So, considering the effort, and having completed all the assignments on time, I think I can hope for an A in CT 101.

Assignment #1

Assignment #2

Assignment #3

Assignment #4

Assignment #5

Mid-semester assessment

Assignment #7

Assignment #8

Assignment #9

Assignment #10

Assignment #11

Everything that we learn in our daily lives, we apply them even unknowingly into the world. It can be a skill, an idea, a thought, a process, a method. Sometimes working through a particular project teaches us some deeper aspects that we do not acknowledge instantly. For example, while customizing the website not only we learned the procedure to build a website on WordPress, we also learned to be patient with any major project because taking one step at a time makes any work easier and clearer. In this class along with creating GIFs, memes, finding out several assignment webpages, learning about so many cool different ways to express creativity like the assignment repository, creating and customizing a website- I also enjoyed seeing my classmates’ creativity levels. Every blog post from each of them was a new idea and perception. I enjoyed the method of composing each blog post in this class. I feel like I have always wanted to format and compose assignments in this method. This format is my favorite style and I have always loved writing in this format in my social media posts. Now when I have learned to make GIFs, I will be making some often. I have already started to use the ones I made to communicate with friends. I remember doing an assignment in this class in which I used GIFs to tell a story. I think this is going to be one of my ways to express a story from now on. It will expand my creativity along with my readers’. CT 101 has made me look at things I use every day in a different way. The use of social media, how it can be embedded into our professional platform is one of them. Students who will be using their newly customized websites for professional usage now know how to hyperlink social media accounts to their websites for the visitors to find them. This way, there are more available mediums to connect to them. Speaking of my website, I have been procrastinating in creating a blog to publish my writings. CT 101 tutorials and class sessions have made me finally get it started. This class made me realize once again that every time I hear something about being creative, I can only think of putting my thoughts and imagination into my own words and style. I like studying communications. I want to be able to communicate better with people using other methods except writing too. So, here I am majoring in Communications Technology. I believe the skills I have learned in CT 101, will benefit me in my further courses as well.

Also, I have learned to pay more mindful attention to the content on the internet. By this I mean, if I like a haircare tutorial video on Youtube, now I start to think about writing a review on this! After learning skills in CT 101, I can now connect those to developing my creative and thoughtful writing skills.

I have decided to maintain the personal website that I have registered and customized as CT 101 class project. As I have mentioned before, I have been thinking about creating my own blog to publish my writings. A website feels like a more focused way on the internet to stay connected to people from all over the world. I can always post my writings on my social media accounts but maintaining a website makes it a certain page that focuses only on one particular work of mine. I understand that maintaining a website may sometimes feel like extra work to do because of full-time college classes. But I believe if I have the intention and mindset to keep it, and believe that I started it only to take it further, I will keep it. I can post the writings that I post on my social media accounts on sajanisufian.com as well.

This is the homepage of my website. Since it’s “my” website and I intend to use it for posting my writings, I thought it would be nice to welcome my visitors with something encouraging I believe in.

I took my time deciding on how to organize my “about” menu. Then I removed the “contact” menu from my purple website. I just wrote some basic information about myself on the “about” menu.

With the menu “blog”, I have a sub-page called “creative writing”. I will post my fictional writings under that menu. And fact-based, opinion-based discussions directly under “blog”.

So far, there are three blog posts on my website. Please read them anytime you want & leave some thoughts, comments for me.

First post

Introductory post

You are fine!

I have created a menu called “favorite quotes” on my website. I often come across sayings/quotes by different people that I like. I have the intention of sharing those on my website with proper credit as well.

I spend a lot of time on social media reading posts from others and thinking about them. I try to analyze every discussion that I come across. Trying to understand the writer’s main point, perception teaches me how every mind is so contributive in this society somehow. This exercise expands my critical thinking capacity. During my free time, I often happen to write down what’s on my mind/a thought, or opinion about a current issue, or a story that has been on my mind for a while. Before registering my domain, it was my intention to use my personal website for the same cause. This is how I plan to keep and maintain my website.

I decided to design my site icon with my initials. I created this very basic design on Photoshop and used it as my site icon. When I had to decide between a few appropriate domain names for my website, I finally decided to go with my first & last name. The main reason I chose purple as my background color is that it’s my favorite color. And it combines well with my site purpose because it will be mostly writings. This dark color gives the visitors the impression that the content in this site is serious. I also added “photography” as one of my menus before, but then I realized that I should only focus on one part which is writing. So far, I like how my site looks. I did not have much frustrations while customizing it, I just had to be so attentive and patient with the process. I was excited too. Professor Ryan’s tutorials have been really helpful. I decided to take off the secondary menu and leave the footer area of my site only with the “recent posts”.  I think I will keep it simple and serious as it is now.

Once again, I would like to thank everyone in this class. Even though we did not get to attend class in-person, I still think somehow we contributed to each other’s creativity “digitally”. Keep sharing great thoughts and ideas.