My Blogging Experience

When I first heard that we were going to keep blogs as a class assignment, I'll admit I was (and still am) a little skeptical of how well I would do with this. I’d never written a blog, or really read any, prior to this course, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. It took a few posts to adjust to the whole idea of blogging: putting your ideas out where everyone (..well, our class anyway..) can see and judge them. Having now written a few blogs, I’m actually very glad that I got to have this experience with blogging.

I have learned more about writing responses to articles and forming sound opinions on the topics. I’ve always had some trouble with putting together my thoughts and opinions in a logical manner, especially in writing; I know what I think or how I feel about a topic, but how to word it in a reasonably intelligent manner is usually rather difficult. Knowing that everyone can read what I write, rather than just the professor as is most often the case, added a little pressure to writing the blogs, but I think blogging is ultimately easier than turning in formal essays and such.

It was kind of surprising to me that it wasn't more difficult to write some of these blogs. Though starting them off was sometimes reasonably difficult, once I began writing, it was easier than I expected. This is probably because the whole process of blogging seemed less formal than submitting papers for class. For me, it seemed that posting class assignments on the Internet in a blog was easier because in some aspects the Internet has already become kind of a personal outlet for thoughts and ideas.

The simplest way in which my web habits have changed is that I have been spending a little more time on the Internet- reading and taking notes on the articles; writing, posting, and reading blogs; looking up things relative to our readings. Other than this though, I did attempt to pay more attention to articles on the web for a while instead of simply using the Internet as a distraction from things I should be doing. However, I quickly fell back into my old habits for the most part, with the only alteration being that I am more conscious of how I spend my time on the Internet.