Final Reflections

I am your teacher, as you well know, and not a student, so I approach the great WRIT 101 blog experiment of Spring 2010 from a different perspective. For me, the questions are: how successful was this? What did my students get out of it? What have we learned together as a class, and ultimately, was the experiment a success or failure? The truth is I don’t know, and I plan to reserve judgment once I read all of your reflections.

What I hoped would come out of this is that you would become better writers. I wanted to take the writing experience out of the cold dead hands of the classroom and into the “real world” or at least “the real world of the Internet” which of course is not real. I digress. I also wanted to teach you a little bit about publishing work on the web and creating an Internet persona. I definitely think there was some wavering interest in that. Students are not necessarily as Tech obsessed as the media would have you believe, but I hope that you at least learned some new skills about the world of blogging and web writing.

I know that for me, maintaining a blog was a major contributing factor in my becoming a writer. I started a website when I was 15 and in high school. Remember, this was 1997. The Internet was in its infancy then. They didn’t have applications like “blogspot.” The word blog didn’t even exist. I wrote all my own html and every week I would post random writings about my life. (These were called “vanity sites” at the time.) It was through doing this, the constant practice of writing for an audience that I realized I might have a gift for it. When I would get feedback about my work from random strangers, it encouraged me to keep going. I wanted to entertain and impress my readers. So this was my experience. Yours obviously will vary.

I hope that at least a few of you continue to blog in whatever capacity is fun and meaningful for you. Writing on a regular basis for other people (even if it’s only a few of your friends) I find can be really therapeutic and fun. Also the practice of reading other people’s blogs can be an intriguing endeavor. From this class, my favorite blog posts were probably the “Food” posts. The posts on television and “choose your own adventure” were also particularly fun to read. I look forward to reading your reflections on the process, and thanks for joining me in the great blog experiment. I know you didn’t really have a choice, but thanks all the same J