310 Reflections April 17, 2007
Posted by waldrup49 in English310.trackback
Wow! The end of the semester………………………………………………. but not the end of this blog. I was not sure what I would discover about the use of blogs in teaching writing when I originally started this but I know I don’t want to stop the process.
I know that the use of the RSS along with this blog has been the most interesting part of my education in a long time. I feel as though this has lead to a sense of self discovery in me. Let me clarify that a little bit. My blog involved using certain search terms, newpaper feeds, etc but I would say that I found things that actually pertained to my subject about 3 or 4% of the time. I was amazed to find myself reading most of the other articles that were appearing. I found myself interested in many things that I had not looked at before and in the process learned about so many new things. Through this project I now have started to look at subjects such as the needs for migrant farm workers on a daily basis. I had no idea it would interest me so much. Some of you are probably asking what blogs and the needs of migrant farm workers have to do with each other and the answer is for the most part nothing. A story on migrant farm workers came up in my RSS reader one day and i read it. it then took about 10 seconds to subscribe to a google search feed on that subject. Now i look at them everyday. This has happened to me exactly 6 times this semester with my two blogs and now I have 22 other subscriptions outside of my blog subjects.
The only negative I had with this blog was my own procrastination and time management with the project parameters. I had a little to freedom under the flexable schedule of due dates for posts and comments. I think when conduct my class using blogs I will have more structured due dates for specific posts. This should not be a needed requirement at the college level but should be taken into account at the secondary level.
My plan is to continue to use my blog and my RSS reader to continue this blog (it will probably have different categories then 310 and 311) and I might expand it to include one or two more categories about social studies and the process of becoming a teacher. I will extend my search to include and focus on more scholarly journals. hopefully this will help me develop an ongoing teaching philosophy throughout my career. To me it is the perfect way to express, review, and edit my beliefs while hopefully getting feedback from outside sources.
I had a very similar experience this semester with my blog. I think you are absolutely right Wade. While some students may feel aprehensive about the idea of RSS agregators and blogging, once they dive into a project that they are truly interested in, their personal development and interest in reading academic content on the web will sky rocket. My only complaint with the assignment is that it is time consuming for this very reason. It is not much of a complaint when I consider the exploration I was able to take part in through the blog, and all of the new perspectives I gained on the issue as well as other issues I stumbled across. I’m glad that you are going to continue blogging in the classroom. I want to do the same.
[...] Commented: 310 Reflections [...]
Remember the simple rule about time management.
With proper planning you can do anything you want.