MY BLOG EXPERIENCE!
This is one of my final posts regarding my emerging technologies course and I’ve got to say that I’ve really enjoyed using a blog for class. For my overall blog experience I feel like it has been interesting and has been fun. I was a little apprehensive at first to start a blog. I was a regular reader of blogs that others kept and felt they had a lot of merit and a lot to share. But, I didn’t think of my self as someone who had much to share through a blog. Plus, blogs seemed like a medium for others more technologically savvy, which I was not.
I chose to use WordPress for my blog. After using it for the past month, I feel like WordPress offers users a pretty easy format for creating and maintaining a blog. First of all, they have adopted an interface that is similar to other web 2.0 technologies, such as Facebook. WP has also arranged the page for creating new posts so it is similar to MicroSoft Word, with all the familiar formatting options and a familiar text window. Because of this, I felt like the site was easy to use, even for me as a first time blogger.
WordPress also allows its users to customize and personalize their blogs using optional themes and CSS programming, which is similar to some social networking sites. The widgets offered through WP were also nice. I felt like the widgets offered me the chance to do certain things that I was interested in doing and doing them easily, for example adding personalized backgrounds and fonts, pictures, blog stats, tag clouds, and links to the blogs of my classmates. I think that the options available through WP are probably pretty typical of most blog sites. Though they may not be what preferred by experienced bloggers or experienced techies, they were perfect for me (with my limited experience les choices may have been better). These are additional features of WP that I liked. I think that most of us are interested in personalizing our Web 2.0 technologies to suit and reflect us as much as possible. And I think it is one of the elements of Web 2.0 technologies that most attracts people to these types of technologies.
As for keeping a blog for a course, I really enjoyed it. I had never thought about what a blog could offer, but it’s been super helpful. At first I was stressed because I was trying to use the technology, i.e. figuring out how everything worked, combined with completing an assignment. But, the blog posts have been a great way to work through how I’ve approached certain Web 2.0 technologies, what I liked about certain technologies, and better understanding how others are using these technologies. Like Patrick, our instructor, has said, my blog will be a helpful reference of these Web 2.0 technologies in the future. And as I head into another semester of grad school in SLIS and then on to my career, these technologies will become more and more important.
Another aspect of using a blog for a course that I really liked was being able to read through the blogs of my classmates and see how they approached certain topics. I think that having this type of interaction with my classmates and their work added another level of depth to the learning experience for me. We posted on our blogs after every class meeting, writing about our experiences, and posted all of our papers on our blogs as well. Often my classmates talked about things that hadn’t occurred to me, or wrote about things I had experienced but didn’t know how to solve or deal with. Plus, I was able to browse their blogs and see what I liked about their blogs as a visitor. And, the visitor perspective would be hard to gain for me blogging on my own. By being able to read through others’ blogs I gained a lot more experience and knowledge I wouldn’t have gotten any other way. I wish that more classes required blogs regarding the course content. The blog format offers much more depth and flexibility I think, than things like course wikis or typed summaries do. As the creator of the blog you have access to that record for as long as you like, even after the course is thorough. For the future, maybe I’ll start a blog strictly covering my current courses!
It sounds like your blog was very useful throughout the workship. Your blog along with every elses from the class will be available as a reference. You are probably more tech savy than you think.