My Flight Path

Current Coordinates

My background in interactive media stems from my hands on role as a Community Leader (CL) at UVic Residences, where I design promotional posters and informational displays (known in residence jargon as “passives”). Grounding my work in empathy and practical audience design, my core baseline skills lie in crafting age appropriate, visually clean media that avoids cognitive overload and resonates with first year students. My goal as a CL is to keep residents informed about campus events and information that can be help them throughout their 1^st year. I regularly produce passive content on varied topics such as academic support, campus wellness resources, and harm reduction.

However, reflecting on my skills, I have identified three key areas for growth from my starting baseline. First, my understanding of personalized learning and open pedagogy remains superficial. Currently, my passives rely on one-way transmission rather than giving students agency over their learning. Second, despite intuitive skills in layout design, I lack formal grounding in learning theory and networked pedagogy to transform passive poster views into active student engagement. Third, working within a public institution like UVic, I lack structured digital literacy surrounding media ethics, routinely using pictures or logos without verifying copyright, licensing, or official university sourcing.

Mapping the Route

To address these baseline gaps, I have established targeted goals aligned directly with the course learning outcomes.

To move beyond static broadcast toward personalized learning, I aim to create dynamic poster designs by integrating interactive elements like QR codes and quick pulse surveys into my passive posters. To assess whether a resident has truly directed their own learning path, I will conduct surveys and look for evidence such as residents attending listed campus workshops or starting peer discussions based on the passives I post.

To enhance interactive media engagement, I plan to leverage Microsoft Teams as the official UVic Residence communication channel by creating interactive spaces with embedded polls, campus event video previews, and collaborative resource hubs. Simultaneously, I will build my Personal Learning Network by following three educational technology practitioners on LinkedIn weekly. Analyzing their strategies will shift my role from a basic media creator to an intentional learning designer, helping me build far more effective digital spaces for my residents.

Furthermore, to address privacy, copyright, and ethical open practice, I will author a comprehensive media literacy checklist for the broader Community Leader team at UVic Residences. This tool will standardise how we verify Creative Commons licenses, attribute public domain assets, cite official UVic documentation, and respect student privacy in public media.

Potential Turbulence

Navigating these goals involves technical and ethical challenges. The most daunting hurdle is understanding how to use Microsoft Teams to drive genuine student interaction rather than passive compliance. To overcome this, I will consult official Microsoft documentation and UVic educational technology resources to implement interactive features like customized tabs and automated poll bots ethically and securely. I will also run a low-stakes test poll on a single floor to measure baseline participation against poster traffic; if engagement falls below 15%, I will pivot my communication strategy.

Managing intellectual property and generative AI ethics presents another challenge. I will address this by maintaining a personal log of all AI assisted ideation and reviewing my public facing work against UVic copyright standards before posting media for my residents on Teams or my passives.