Final Blog Post

The blog post in English 1010 was a new experience that required a lot of reading and research to get familiarized with the online network. I think it was a good diversity instead of using just paper based writings, but I felt that it was more time consuming. In my case for instance I had to spend more time learning the tools before getting to the real task of learning essay writing. I am not sure if everybody in the class felt that way, but for me it was one of the most time costly activities and I also felt disadvantaged compared to others who had a good amount of blogging experience.

The reading, commenting, response, and classmate evaluations were some of the fun parts of this blog exercises. I think one of the first things that I noticed doing this blog posts was that it needed a lot of reading more than anything else. It was probably the only thing that required reading the textbooks. These readings I would say were great guidelines for writing effective essays. However, it could have been done on paper and it was not necessary to do all the additional blogs learning unless the intention was actually to learn blog themselves. The visuals, Google reader, blog designs, connecting to other bloggers and so were only a few of the burdens I had doing the blog assignment. Again I felt that it was not very important to learn all these things and the time could have been used to learn to write better conventional paper based essays.   

Commenting on fellow classmates and receiving one was one of my favorite things as far as this blog assignment. It was interesting to see what other students are writing, to know your level in comparison to others in the class, what they think about your post etc. Sometimes students could give valuable feedback that a teacher might have missed. Blog comments were not always reasonable and factual. Yet the author can get enough comments to assess his or her work in the eyes of his or her classmate.

My favorite blog post rather posts were the fallacy posts. This is because first of all by the time we started those fallacy posts I was already familiarized with the basic blogging procedures and second I was able to relate myself to the logic and arguments behind the fallacies from my math background. I wrote two posts of those fallacies and one comparison between two fallacies. They all had interesting background and it was at least a bit of fun after all the days I got stuck for hours posting just a blog or an image.  Of those fallacies posts I wrote the “Hasty generalization” was my favorite one.

I could not say Professor Boughn should just drop blogging of the list in the coming class because it might have been useful for others. I’ve seen many of my classmates take it as the fun part of English 1010. There were also some benefits such as the classmate network, evaluation, responses, comments etc. The best thing about the blogging assignment was I think that it enforced textbook readings. For me however, the blog assignment was not as helpful as might have been intended and I don’t think I gained much out of it.