Blog Reflection...

It’s amazing the way that technology changes how we experience and interact with the world around us. For this assignment, I was asked to create a blog and involve myself in the instantaneous community that follows from posting ideas and thoughts through an online persona. I had some initial hesitancy about putting myself out there in cyberspace. However, once I got past that fear (which was also heightened by this past weeks discussion on cyber security), I was able to realize that blogging is actually quite powerful.

In short, creating and maintaining a blog is something that takes effort but also allows me to declare that I have something meaningful to contribute to a global collection of ideas. And, the linking and commentary aspects of the blog allow others to validate and comment on my ideas. In the end, I think blogs are thoughtful “idea incubators” in the truest democratic sense. I choose what to present to the world at large and hope for some sort of meaningful response which is essentially guaranteed because my audience could be anyone anywhere.

I thought that the overall assignment was interesting and very helpful in allowing me to teach myself how to go about the process of creating, maintaining, commenting, and customizing real-time online content. That being said, I did have some minor problems related to the structure of the assignments.

First, I think that the overall demands of the blog assignments were too low in regard to the number of topics that we had to address. In other words, I would have preferred to blog about an array of information technologies. In retrospect, having only two assigned topics was somewhat limiting. While it was an effective experience to post on two pre-selected topics, I think a better idea is to make our postings relate more to what we are interested in researching and learning more about.

Second, I was sometimes frustrated at the amount of time I had to wait in order to see updates on other people’s sites and also, at times, seeing feedback on my mine. I think part of this has to do with the fact that this project was an assignment as opposed to a real world experience. People use blogs because they have something meaningful to say, so it makes sense that the blog project would fail to incite true passionate commentary and feedback because it’s an assignment. Instead of the current method we’re using, I think a good idea is to let students choose an interesting position, and defend it on other people’s blogs through reading and response. The point here is that people are much better at creating passionate discourse about chosen topics.

In the end, this assignment introduced me to an online practice that I would not have otherwise ventured into. Since I have gained experience in creating and maintaining a blog, I am comfortable enough with the process and have since learned the value of using blogs in an educational setting. Through collaboration with teachers, this Web 2.0 tool can be used to enrich school activities and enhance student learning.

Signing off~

Kate