Final Reflection

Blogging has its ups and downs for me. I am not particularly excited by the idea of using it as a part of a course. I think it's because it forces me to be on a computer for yet more precious time. However, I must admit that I learned a lot from my personal exploration of a topic and the subsequent required writing about it. And, I learned much from visits to fellow colleagues' blogs. I even gained a great cartoon from Bart who sent it to me upon request. And, in terms of the actual journey, I viewed more videos, visited more websites, and gained more personal insight into how people use or don't use technology than any book would have provided.

All that said, the constraint of working within a small group of bloggers also had its ups and downs. On the positive side, I felt that I got to know Ashley, Bruce and Portip as people even though we never met. Bruce is a passionate gamer. He found more websites on games that I could count. Ashley is teacher. She wrote about how she utilized her learning into her classroom. And "Tah Tah" is an educator of another land. I even learned about a different culture through Tah. We, unfortunately, had a couple of folks who dropped out which limited our input. But, I did venture out into the blogs of others outside of my group from time to time.

The course constraint of covering one topic for a long period of time caused me to create a mental outline of what I was going to cover and when. For example, week one I'd cover "what is ___ (topic). Week two "how is it used." Week three "here's an example - an article, video, etc." Week four "here's software on it. Week five "here's how I used the software." So, for me, I needed a plan of attack to cover all of the areas I thought were pertinent to the topic and that would be of interest to others learning with me about that particular topic. Maybe, given the opportunity in the future, I would take a more constructionist approach to blogging used in a course in terms of letting the specific topic develop from week to week...which is probably more in line with what blogging should be about.

Overall, I really like that blogging brings the art of writing back into the forefront of the way we live. For a long time, I was thinking that writing was a lost art...especially in the business world where so much communication is in bullets and matrices. The internet, in general, has given a rebirth to the lost art of writing. Only, I hope that the good/correct grammar and punctuation practices will return in the future as well rather than the invented shortcuts often used for texting, IMing, etc.

So there you have it. The good, bad and the ugly of blogging.

Happy holidays!

Mickey