What I learned in the first hour of cyberschool #edcmooc

I feel breathless with the number of digital tasks that have exited my fingertips in the past few hours and intensely inadequate after seeing the incredible variety of blogs and creations of every kind associated with the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC.  

What I have done:

• I carefully read the introductory email and followed the instructions to create a twitter account (I did have one set up but it was all but pushing up the daisies since I had only ever tweeted three times previously). I sent out a tweet using the #edcmooc hashtag.  It only took me three tries to get it right. (Which left me wondering, when I deleted the previous tweets does it mean three of them went out anyway? Or did the ones that I used the wrong hashtag for go into empty cyberspace? And also, who exactly sees my tweets?) 
• I created a Flickr account
• I joined the facebook group for EDCMOOC
• I pinned my location on the big google map
• I revived, cleaned up and re-purposed an old blog to use for my EDC blog and proceeded to write my first post
• As I found the EDC boards, I found a number of other blog posts and got lost in them for several hours, then saved them on my own blog to be able to follow them, in the process realizing there are more new concepts/applications out there than I had ever imagined
• Looking through those other blogs also led me to a few youtube videos and I was astounded at the level of ability and creativity in these videos from people who were apparently, just fooling around

At this point, I began to feel overwhelmed and on the heels of this flurry of cyber activity, I received an email from the course professors opening the course content to all those signed up for the course (how many are we? I thought I heard the number 36,000 but that seems impossible).  And so now, I will turn my mind to utopian and dystopian views of information technology on the Coursera "wiki" (now I even know what that is!).

You will notice I did not put any hyperlinks into this post, having perhaps overdone it on my first post. You see, I was just so excited at learning what a web essay is and trying out the fun of embedding links. I still feel like I know nothing in comparison to that vast sea of information (and only on this one topic), but at least my blog helps me remember that I have learned something.