Flight Path
Current Coordinates
I’m a fourth-year Computer Science student at UVic, finishing my remaining courses online this term. My background is technical: Python, Git, shell scripting, a small Node/Express blog app I built to understand how a web stack fits together. Nobody has ever taught me learning theory. What I have instead is a decade of being on the receiving end of the internet as a learning environment — YouTube tutorials, Stack Overflow, Discord servers, documentation.
Until recently, “personalized learning” would have perceived to me as a marketing phrase for software. What has shifted my thinking is running an Instagram account, @nav.tries, where I post short reels of my golf swing and DJ practice. I started it because golf reels from other creators made me want to try. The account has quietly become the most structured learning I do: filming forces me to notice my own form, editing in DaVinci Resolve makes me watch the same three seconds forty times, and posting means someone might comment on something I couldn’t see myself. That loop — produce, publish, get feedback, revise is closer to what I suspect this course means by personalized learning.
So the skills I bring are production and iteration: video editing, a reasonable eye for what holds attention in the first two seconds, comfort building and shipping small web things, and a willingness to post work that isn’t finished yet.
Mapping the Route
Two of the course objectives line up with what I already want. The first is developing a personal learning network. I currently consume from the internet far more than I contribute to it, and my network is passive. I’d like to leave this course actually in conversation with people rather than just following them on social media.
The second is data ownership and licensing. I use music in my reels. I’ve been sloppy about it, on the assumption that everyone is sloppy about it, which is not a defence. Understanding Creative Commons, fair dealing, and what copyright actually permits is directly useful to me.
As a project, I’d like to treat my content account as the case study. Documenting what building an audience actually teaches, and where the algorithm shapes what I make without me noticing.
Anticipating Turbulence
The theory worries me most. I can build things; My plan is to read the assigned theory against something concrete I’ve already done rather than in the abstract, and to ask early when I’m lost instead of nodding along.
The second concern is public writing. Posting a reel is low stakes. Posting reflective writing under my name, where being wrong is legible, is not. I’m going to treat that discomfort as the point of the exercise.