What use is blogging?

The blogging experience has been great for this class.  I don’t think I have ever done so much enjoyable, useful, low stakes writing as I have for this class.  Most importantly, the writings were useful to me as a student of comp theory.  The ones that were the most useful were those where I posted “take-aways” for a particular paper, chapter or book that we were working on in class.  This allowed (forced) me to engage more deeply with the texts, but also the product was a useful tool later in the semester when I had to go back to refer to that content when preparing papers.  A  second type of blog assignment, where we had to either post a plan-in-progress for our unit plan, or we had to discuss some topic related to the theory we were discussing that week, was also pretty useful. 

The social aspect of blogging is also nice, for some of the same reasons.  It was interesting and actually valuable to see what others thought were important points of our readings.  It was also nice to get to know the other students in an online context. 

One piece of advice I might give (and remember for myself) is that it might have been better if the instructor had reminded us from time to time why we were blogging these “take-aways,” summaries and  reader responses.  I sometimes got caught up in the moment with all the reading, so the information that I wrote about was sometimes not as useful to me as it could have been if I’d been able to keep my perspective, with the final project still far on the horizon.  By keeping the needs of the final unit plan in mind, I might have annotated and responded to the readings in ways that would have been more valuable at the end of the semester.