My Final Blog - About Blogging

It’s been an interesting journey blogging in this class. While hesitant to attempt the venture at first, I’ve come to appreciate its value as a reflective tool. Just as scholars continually argue, writing forces one to create structured and articulate thoughts, and blogging has allowed me to tap into this learning resource in order to formulate sometimes intricate and sometimes purely reactionary ideas about the assigned readings for this class. Although it didn’t seem that we utilized the tool to its greatest potential (that is, we didn’t feed off each other’s writings), knowing that someone somewhere just might read my blog forced me to really try to make my ideas coherent. Perhaps I changed someone’s ideas with my blogs. I like to think I did, at least.

At times it was difficult for me to stream together articulate ideas about the readings we did for class, but at other times it came as easy to me as simply talking about what I’d read. In either case, blogging forced me to reflect on what I’d read in a coherent fashion, which then triggered more in-depth and critical thinking about the topics. Furthermore, as I was forced to reflect upon the readings before joining the class discussion about them, my blogs helped me bring different ideas to the table, ideas that I’d already been stewing over in front of my computer monitor.

Perhaps the most poignant idea I have benefited from reading and discussing in this class has been about the evolution of literacy technologies. From Ong’s argument that writing transforms human consciousness through Goody’s ideas about lists serving as advanced organizational tools, to Baron’s thought-invoking essay on the stages of literacy technologies “From Pencils to Pixels” and on through Charney’s postulation about the psychological effects of hypertext on reading and writing processes, I learned that although the majority might shy away from and be wary about emerging literacy technologies, we eventually adopt and adapt them to our literacy developments. In fact, it could be argued that different literary genres arise from these advancements. The blog, for instance, is becoming more and more esteemed as a valid means for academic discourse and collaboration. I’ve read a book comprised entirely of e-mails this semester, and last year I wrote a creative piece using the electronic messaging system as my genre. Indeed, Ong, Goody, Baron, and Charney have allowed me to be a bit less cynical toward technology, and their ideas, in conjunction with blogging in this class have shifted my attitude to embrace technology as the next step toward greater, more intricate and more sophisticated literacy skills in mine and future generations.

While I’m still not completely sold on blogging, at least I can now say I have experience doing it. It’s inevitable that I will come in contact with the exercise again, as blogging has become a worldwide phenomenon, a web of sometimes fleeting and sometimes revolutionary ideas that can influence any one at any place at any time. Blogging was useful for this course, so I hope I can learn to utilize its worth in other aspects of my life.