My First Blogging Experience

This has been the first class that I have ever had to use a blog. In fact this is the first time I have ever used a blog. Looking back at it I never really felt like I was completely in tuned to the blogs. That is not to say that I did not but work into the blogs, I am just saying that I was not used to the whole blogging concept. I did like how we used the blogs to discuss the different readings though. I think that reading over the different blogs that people wrote was a helpful tool in further understanding the readings. One thing that I think was hard to do was to keep commenting on different blogs when everyone read the same thing and sometimes the comments got repetitive or were on the same topic. I think that this made it hard keep commenting on the posts when I felt like sometimes I was repeating myself or saying something that someone else had already said.

Knowing that this blog was online and was public did not really affect what I would say or discuss in my blog. I felt that the public aspect of it was easy to look past because of the two classes that were both blogging at the same time. It is easy to comment on someone's blog when I know I will probably not see that person or have to discuss the blog with them. Plus, our class discussion did not involve the blog writing as much as just talking about the book as a whole. This made it easy for me not to worry about having to discuss my blog outloud. Plus as I mentioned earlier, the blogs being public and us having the ability to comment on the blogs helped my learning of the book. I hope my comments were meaningful and gave some good insight to others as well, because I know other people's blogs and comments certainly helped me. I think that my strongest post were those that dealt with Food, INC. I was much more interested in that book than I was in the book Lost Mountain. I feel that this reflected in my blogs because I think that not having to read the whole book, and only having a few different blog assignments really helped me focus on just doing that assignment. Whereas, when it was with LM I kind of saw myself getting away from focus because there were more posts and there was more reading to do. I did think that both books were interesting in their own right, but having a movie to go along with FI made it more interesting and easier to blog about for myself. So I definitely think that my worst blog was one of my earlier posts about LM, especially since I was not used to blogging at all and I don't think that I really got used to it until later in the quarter. My best blog in my opinion is the one that we did as groups. I think that being able to collaborate with others on the blog made it very easy to put up a well thought out and all-together blog.

Looking back at the whole blog experience I think that it was a good learning tool and experience for me. I had never done it before so it was something new for me to do in a class. The best thing it did for me was helping understand the readings and books though because I was able to see what other people's thoughts were. It was definitely a good discussion tool without having to bring the whole class together to hear everyone's thoughts, but the blog made it so everyone's thoughts were visible.