The blog that I have created here has been my first experience into the blogging world. While I have been aware that it is a very popular and new way to publish your thoughts on various different subjects for people to access all over the internet, I had never taken the time to actually look over or get into it myself. As far as meeting people online, I don't feel like it was something I was super interested. While it was nice to see what others had to say about my opinions, I prefer the old fashioned method of simply writing papers and then discussing in class rather than doing it online.
One way in which the blog did interest me was that I enjoyed being able to express my feelings on what we did in class. Some of the experiments were quite challenging, and it was good to see that others in the class felt the same way. Also, it forced me to think about the assignments we did in class afterwards, and often I realized where I went wrong and how I could do better next time. I also notices that most often what I had posted was very similar to what others had to say. One other aspect I enjoyed was that it allowed us to get a little personal about ourselves, and that was interesting to read and comment back and forth on throughout the semester.
Unfortunately, I did find that because the due dates seemed to slip my mind; mostly because they were posted online and I often forget to check, I didn't always get to the blog on time. Which will affect my grade I'm sure. I have never been required to write online and respond to others for any class before, so although this was my first attempt, it was a good experience and I'll definately be able to do better should another teacher require blogging in their class..(which I'm sure they will!)
I liked that our professor allowed us the 20% of our grade to be strictly directed at blogs. Sadly I did not gain all of these points since I missed one blog and another was late. For that reason, I wish there were more papers that we could have written in order to boost our grade. I know its the age of electronics and internet, but sometimes books and papers are just better. Just my opinion!!
I will probably not continue my blog after this class. I appreciate the fact that I learned what blogging was about, and may possibly get into it in the future, but at the moment I find that with work and school full time I don't have time to blog as effectively as I'd like to.
In all, I do think it's a nice part of the class, and wouldn't suggest you take it out completely. Just maybe consider those old fashioned students to enjoy writing the plain old paper and handing it in hard copy. =]
