Final Reflection

When I began this course my technology experience can be best described minimal and everything I knew was almost entirely self taught. Acceptance into the DigIn program and the beginning of this course was analagous for me to jumping into something nose first without really being sure that I could do it. I was immensely nervous when I started this course and reviewed the syllabus, I had "heard" of a LAMP server before, but if pushed on what it is each of the individual components "does" I would have not been able to tell you. As I proceeded through the course I really had very minimal problems with any of the assignments. I kept waiting for "the other shoe to drop" in terms of one of the assignments going horribly wrong or that my virtual machine would just completely crash. None of this happened and in fact I actually started putting it all together and began to understand why we were doing things in the order that we did. In fact as I made an outline for my final paper it was entirely clear to me what we had achieved in this course and why. I think my favorite parts ended up being the sections on MySql and Php. I had always been curious about MySql (stemming from a passion for databases) and I was most intimidated by Php and ended up most proud for my efforts because I wasn't initially "getting" so I took extra measures to figure it out and once I realized I had I understood the key to understanding this language is understanding its relationship within the larger scheme of things.
Really, I think my technology perspective has changed. I feel less intimidated by the notion of trying new things and even taking the initiative to access the UACBT courses to learn more about technologies that interest me. Fundamentally, I feel that a little bit of research and a great deal of common sense has made technology quite accessible.