Blogging has been an entirely new experience to me. Before this class I had never maintained my own blog or even commented on someone’s. I just looked over my other postings and the first thing I realize is that writing on a blog changes my expectations of my finished product. Unlike most of the academic writing I have done, when writing for the blog I did not worry about using a formal academic tone, even though in posting what I wrote it was “published” in a way that other responses and papers I have written were not. I think this relaxation of tone is largely due to my own understandings of the genre of blogs. Blogs are not supposed to be polished academic pieces, and so I did not feel pressured to produce a polished academic paper when I wrote. Even when I write responses for other classes and give a hard copy to the professor, I am usually overly stiff and formal in my writing tone. Writing and publishing on the internet seems like a less academic setting and, with the possibility of receiving and leaving responses, much more conversational.
It is this conversational nature of the blogs that I liked the most, which I have also experienced on online forum board (although I liked the look of the blogs better). So, with this conversational element of the blogs, I found it to be less an exercise in new media and more a way of expressing my response to readings and seeing how others responded (and then commenting on each other’s ideas). This, of course, was one of the main purposes of the blog. This opportunity to respond and see how others responded often covered ideas that were not touched upon in the class, and so the blogs were an opportunity to engage with the readings and ideas of the class in greater depth. Not being the most talkative person in class (I never have been), I enjoyed the chance to engage in the blog dialogues.
As I reviewed my blog, I also noticed that I only included one picture throughout all of my posts. That post, on Sirc, was the only one in which I could actually think of an image to include, as a box image perfectly fit Sirc. Even then, trying to get the picture to do what I wanted it to do was frustrating, (which is one reason why I did not include pictures in subsequent posts). Although images, videos, etc, can make a post more attractive or interesting, for the most part, most of my posts were picture-free merely because I could think of no reason to include them. Perhaps this is because I am not usually a visual-learning kind of person. For the most part, then my posts were very alphabetic-text based. I usually composed my posts in a Word document (as I am doing now) because I am afraid that the blog will delete what I say or post it incorrectly. The Word document offers more security that I won’t have to recompose the whole thing if it gets messed up. Of course, the fact that the blog will not let me copy and paste this into the message box and so I have to make the window small and drag it there is quite frustrating, but at least it works.
I think I enjoyed reading others’ blog posts and commenting more than writing my own. Each person had their own particular style and approach with both design (such as use of images) and general tone of response. It was this variety of voices and perspectives that was most valuable with the blogs. I looked forward to seeing any comments my classmates might leave in response to any of my posts, just as I enjoyed posting comments on other posts, although I did not have time to comment on everyone’s.
The experience of blogging has made me more interested in using blogs in one of my classes in the future. We’ll see…
No comments:
Post a Comment