This was the first course I have taken that required me to regularly maintain a blog. As look back at my blog, I can see that it was a worthwhile experience. The blog posts display a review of all of the information covered in this course. It shows my thought processes and ideas behind the different readings, films, and presentations.
My first blog posts consisted of me basically paraphrasing direct information from the works. I didn’t really take the information and make it my own. I also left very little space for discussing my own views concerning the works. I improved on these issues without consciously thinking about them throughout the course. By the end of the course, I was still providing information from the documents, but I was putting my own twists on it with my own words and insights distributed throughout the posts. I think I just got more comfortable with putting my own thoughts with the information. I consider my best post to be from January 20, 2010 and it is titled “Last Third of LM”. Although this was earlier in the quarter, I feel it was a good balance of information and personal insight. I was able to take the information from the book and make it my own. There was a prompt for this blog that helped with this. This blog post allowed me to not only display the information, but also display how the information affected my thinking. As a comparison, I consider my worst blog post to be from January 11, 2010 and it is titled “LM Through Page 85”. This post basically just has the information from the book with page citations. I did not include any analysis or evaluation of the information. This was my worst post because I did not take the information any deeper than just stating it. Although, these two posts are close together, I feel the prompt really made the difference with these posts. The prompt called for me to include more of my thoughts. Later on, I was able to incorporate my thoughts without a prompt.
The defining aspect of a blog is the connection it creates between the author and readers. The blog posts are able to be commented on and the author can review the blogs of others. When I was writing my blogs, I envisioned my audience as being the general population. I was writing about various works that I did not assume the audience already read or gathered the same insights as me. When I was writing posts, I tried to be as detailed as possible as I summarized the works. I did not assume that the reader would automatically understand what I was discussing. I would try to first give details and then incorporate my ideas, so the reader could understand how I formed ideas. As I knew one of the readers would be the professor, I tried to show that I had indeed read the required readings in order to aid my grade. Most of the comments from readers on my posts generally agreed with my posts and offered some additional insights. I also had a few readers who respectfully disagreed with a point and gave their personal views. The agreeing or disagree did not help me much. It was the insights on information and new ways of looking at things that helped with my understanding of things. I feel the insights and new information I provided to other blogs were the most helpful as well. It is always useful to collaborate with others and the comments on blogs allowed for this.
Ultimately, these blog post assignments helped with my understanding of the works studied for this course. Writing about them allowed me to be sure to pay extra attention to readings, films, and presentations that I might have otherwise slacked on. It also allowed me to take the works in the course and apply them to my own thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. Such actions helped me to not only remember, but understand the works better. Now, I can also go back and quickly review my posts in order to recall what I was reading and how I felt about it at that given time. I can trace my thoughts on the books from beginning to end. The blog posts really display my thoughts and ideas about the works while backing all of them up with information.
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