Lana’s piece about her place and her father made me feel closer to her and her family and even her culture. I want to meet her father and see his little garden, see his joy, see Lana’s joy in showing it to someone else, and be thankful I was able to see it. Her take on many of the issues we tackled in class also increased my sensitivity to the bigger picture. Although I tend to think of myself as a big picture thinker, Lana’s view widened it more, and I am thankful for it.
Sam is a gifted writer with a flair for humor. Her most recent blog about her apartment and the intruder really bothered me, as I know it did many of us. Place can be such a comforting thing to us; yet, that was challenged by her experience. Beyond that particular post, I was able to see the world through Sam’s eyes. Even with the world about a foot or so shorter (smile), I learned to see the world with a new sense of wonder as I read Sam’s posts. This is hard to explain because there is an impression of relatability to her posts and her insight into the world.
Nevertheless, I could honestly point to at least one post of everyone’s that I learned something from. My point is more to highlight the overall quality of all the posts. SiYang and her sense of place—being distanced—yet, part of, which is exactly what I commented on. John strong impressions of place and how the world should operate—rather, maybe how he operates always gave me a sense of his interaction within our world. Eric’s humble sense of how the world operates. Although he did make some powerful statements in his blog and class, he always approached from the side of logical emotion, which I found commendable. Russ’s constant dance with technology left me silly. The fonts and pics and every other confounded thing he came up with left me smiling and going, “Why didn’t I think of that?” With the answer coming quickly, “Because I would never have thought of that, but Russ would…”
There is little doubt that reading each other’s posts affected my thinking and my writing. I became more cautious about what I was posting because the readers were intelligent and would point out my miscalculations.
However, I never got a solid sense of the commenting assignment. I was not sure if I was supposed to post on everyone’s or not. I often did post to all, but not always.
I thought it best to post if there was something productive to say. Some posts were so very good, there was nothing to say. I just wanted to read it again, and often did.
As to my blog posts, I believe my posts utilized the technology as my ability allowed and were thought provoking for the class. There were one or two posts that I merely wanted to play devil’s advocate and see what would happen. I think at first I enjoyed the blogs and creating them, but, to be honest, they got tiring toward the end. I came to feel like I was just searching for pictures or videos or whatever to make it look interesting. There were times that after reading one hundred or so pages, I didn’t really feel like writing a blog about the topic I had just read about. Since this is a new area for me, I was afraid of jumping into the fray with only having such limited exposure, which accounts for some aspects of my posts.
At the end of the day in today’s society, I think blogs are a useful but dying craft. (Most students now have never written a blog or read one.) And I’m sorry, but I really wanted to have some humor at the end to make you laugh.
Thank you everyone for reading, posting, and commenting throughout the quarter. I'm a better scholar because of all of you... Namaste.
Rock
P.S. For some reason as I was finishing up, the movie Stealing Home came to mind and I found a picture of Jackie Robinson...
No comments:
Post a Comment