Wednesday, April 7, 2010

So long, and thanks for all the fish

Overall, I would have to rate my experience with the blog as well, interesting. There were times when I found it to be fun, while other times it felt useless and boring. I most enjoyed the collaboration that blogs allowed. Perhaps the biggest help to me was the ability to post parts of my assignments for the class to analyze and critique. This helped me see the strengths and weaknesses of my arguments and assignments and gave me ideas about how fix them. I also really enjoyed analyzing the images and seeing just what everybody else came up with.

But, as I said earlier, blogging was not all kitty cats and roses. I may just be a sucker for self-punishment but I absolutely love long writing assignments. I love researching a question and forming a solution to it. I love having ten or more pages to adequately answer the question with my argument. I do not feel like blogging helped me in that manner. I recognize that new media is becoming more acceptable in scholarly settings but I do not think that blogging personally helped me to be a better scholar. I sometimes felt restricted; like the blogs did not help me to seriously think about something but merely type out the first thing that came to mind. As others have mentioned, I did not enjoy most of the blogs that required us to go out searching for claims, sites, or whatever else to examine their claims.

I do not mean to demean blogging or those who have learned from them. That's great if it has helped people. I just know personally that because of my writing style and preferences, blogging did not help me very much.

6 comments:

  1. I agree with much of your blog Aaron and I understand your frustration in in your second paragraph and respect it. Although in my opinion that is what our bigger papers were for. If we had to write twice as many Rhetorical Analysis or Opinion Papers I would have DIED!! haha I just looked at the blog as a helpful tool for our bigger papers that we had to write.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I get a kick out of how everyone is trying to uses cultural and literary references in their last post title, myself included.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I didnt try to use any cultural or literary reference, I just used the first thing that popped into my head for my title.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Agreed. Blogging just seems a little...unproductive to me. The informality of a blog makes it difficult to see the academic purpose of it all.

    ReplyDelete
  5. maybe y'all are reading the wrong blogs... I've read some pretty darn interesting, well-researched stuff on blogs.

    ReplyDelete