As I approach the end of the Digital Culture course, I am reviewing my learning to date and preparing for the final assignments. Naturally, the prime focus is on course readings, interactions and activities. Apart from tagging weblinks in my lifestream, and offering brief comment in blog posts, I feel I have I have provided sparse analysis of an important component of my capacity to function within digital culture. Over the past 2 months, I am now aware how competent I have become in using a varietyof software applications.

I have never been a teckie – I’m a social scientist. I always see myself as a user of technology – although I am aware of impending dystopic society when I may well become part cyborg before I die. What is significant though is I now have the capacity to create reasonably good quality, digital content. This bodes well not only for me, but for any technophobic practitioner who feels threatened by digital applications. Basically, over the last few weeks, I have noted what my peers have been using, downloaded them and played around with them until I created an acceptable end product. Apart from my phone, all of them are completely free.

Here are my new found digital allies -

Wordpress. I’ve adapted the appearance, changed settings, posted on my blog and lifestream with no hastle. I read recently the VLE is considered dead. Having used Wordpress without hassle, Moodle feels restrictive.

My Sony Ericsson phone. When it came to making video, I had thought about treating myself to a small camcorder. However, the output from my phone has been so good, I don’t really see the point. The great thing about your phone is it is always there with you. At times when you suddenly feel inspired, it’s there in your pocket.

Moyea FLV Downloader. You Tube and Bing offered access to thousands of videos, but Moyea provided the means to download them to my laptop. This gave me the opportunity to edit and insert in my presentations. Like many of the applications I have started using, Moyea is no more complex than iTunes.

Videosoft Convertor. As I am not a teckie, finding videos came in a variety of formats was a potential obstacle for me. However, a quick Google search took me to this application. No matter the format – MP4, WMV, FLV – I simply copied the file into this, and it gave me what I needed.

Windows Movie Maker. This has been a revelation to me. And to think I’ve had it all the time. It’s part of Windows OS. This is what I have used to compile video from different sources, edit clips to fit, narrate and put soundtrack on. It also helped upload to You Tube. I found the Timeline especially easy to use. Once I realised I was not actually cropping the original file, I became more bold with my experiments. If I got it wrong, I simply clicked Undo. This has been my best find.

Desktop Activity Recorder. I found this the least user friendly. It tended to make actual activity slow and shaky. I also had to crop the start and end of each clip to remove the recorder screen. If I was going to be doing a lot of desktop simulations, I think I would invest in buying better software – unless someone knows of better freeware.

Prezi. I saw classmates providing presentations on Prezi and liked the look of it. So I gave it a go. I confess, it took me a few hours of trial and error to get to grips with the menus, but I have produced and presented with it now. I feel so competent, I am going to put my final assignment on it.

All of these have been new to me, but in the space of 12 weeks, I have become proficient enough with them to produce digital content. It makes me wonder how much more I could learn and do if I was producing digital content all the time.