Blog Evaluation

This was a very interesting class as a whole, and was much different than what I first expected when signing up for this class. I really did like the blog idea for this class. It was a very effective way of both gathering and communicating your own ideas to your classmates through a public posting. I've always wanted to start writing in a blog because I thought it was a clever way to discuss your ideas online, for yourself or for others to view, such as this class. This class was a great way to introduce blogging to me to possibly continue writing my ideas and thoughts on here.

I found the class as a whole very interesting, yet it did have both its pros and cons. Lets start off with the good. I liked the activities that the professor chose for us to do, along with the assigned readings. Most of the activities went along with the current reading which made it easy to apply real world communication to the book. Writing in the blogs about our thoughts on the activity was a great way to communicate with our classmates and also compare our findings. The online discussion board was also a convenient way of talking to other students about the readings. It seems that almost every internet class I have taken, there are quizzes that you have to take at least once a week. I find that it gets incredibly old taking a quiz every week, and this class really gave me a break. Instead of memorizing terms for a quiz, we spent more time interacting and communicating with others.

As for some of the parts of class I thought could be improved. Some of the activities were better than others. I thought some of them were a little too general, and evident. Some activities brought out new ideas about online communication, and others I felt were already evident. Some weeks of class the readings didn't always go along with the blog topic. At times, I found it very hard to write about the relations of the two. The biggest part of the class I thought could be improved was the lack of simultaneous converstation or communication with other students involved in the class. Although we all did communicate often through blogs and discussion board, it was all delayed conversation. We didn't get to really interact with other students in real time. I thought some sort of project where you have to a chance to interact more through the internet would have been a good way to wrap up the class. I'm not really sure what sort of project this would be, but it is just an idea.

As I said before, all in all I really enjoyed the class. It was a real break from ordinary online classes that I have taken. Instead of just communicating online, I had the opportunity to learn what other people think and interpret the internet as, and how they use it. Some parts of the class really opened me up to new ideas about the internet both in the present and in the future.