Blogging About Blogging

Before this quarter, the only other time I had to write on a blog was the last time I took a class with Dr. Rouzie. (Computers and Composition course). At the time (Winter 2011), I realized that not only was I not particularly good at design or bringing in images, video, links, etc to my posts. As I reviewed my posts for this quarter, I see that that is still the case. The only time I used images or links was when I posted my introductory and reflective posts for our discussion on Gee’s article. All of my other posts were just text. So, to avoid the “just text” post again, I think I’ll bring in some images:

Here, of course, I’m mainly bringing in images because I found them funny, I wanted to be multi-modal, and because my medium allows it. Of course, as I started getting at in my post on Yancey, sometimes I wonder about the necessity of being multi-modal.

Certainly others in the class have demonstrated a wonderful ability to use images, videos, etc very effectively. I applaud everyone’s efforts in making this blog multi-modal. The multi-modal features have greatly increased my enjoyment of many others’ posts. Generally, others’ multi-modal components had a pretty clear purpose.

Beyond the multi-modal components and capabilities, however, I found the function and use of the blog this quarter to be very important for me in both reading others’ posts and adding my own. The main advantage in my view is that on the blog I’ve read others’ great contributions to our discussion and application of the readings that we did not get to in class discussion. This considerably increased my understanding of some of the readings.

One disadvantage to the in-class discussion (which is always the case): With the way conversation and discussion goes in class, we just can’t cover all the readings as thoroughly as we might like. So, some readings are left with little attention. Additionally, as discussion moves in one direction, people usually only add something that is related to what is being discussed, and so those random unrelated things some of us would like to add or discuss from the readings might be left unsaid.

This is where I think the blog helped make up for some of the disadvantages of the discussion. For a couple of my posts, I wrote about readings that I thought hadn’t been discussed very much in class but that I had something to say about. Others in class did the same thing. I’m sure most of us know that feeling of frustration when in other classes we’ve read 4 or 5 articles for each class and then only discussed 2 of them, never returning to the neglected articles. This is one reason I liked the blog. We had a space to discuss the articles we didn’t have much time for in class.