How time flies. I simply cannot believe we are already approaching the end of summer session 1. These six weeks we spent together in UWP 101 have been a unique exploration of writing like nothing I have experienced before, an exploration I have enjoyed every minute of. Since we were asked to develop this post as a class reflection, I would like to share my thoughts on the learning process and educational value of this course.
I had mixed feelings when I first learned students would maintain personal blogs instead of writing conventional essays in this class. On the one hand, I felt excited for I believe universities should exist as a cradle for innovative ideas and practices. On the other hand, I was skeptical how we could work to incorporate a casual communication medium such as blogs into a formal writing experience. Judging from the quality of our works at this point, my initial worries are proven to be unnecessary. It is incredible to witness blogs working seamlessly with an upper division writing class.
One of the reasons I conclude behind our class success is the openness or public accessibility attached to the idea of blogs. Writing is a means of communication that involves more than one person. As we have been explicitly emphasizing since day one, our posts will be viewable by not only our classmates but also the general public. The consciousness of being observed or judged certainly motivates many of us to experiment and perfect our writing from ideas to techniques. In addition, unlike a traditional English class, we only have one hard weekly deadline but several soft due dates for our works during the week. This practice best ensures the quality of writing by effectively eliminating unnecessary procrastination yet allowing room for the true night owls to choose their most efficient work hours.
Most importantly however, I especially appreciate the courage we possess as a class to challenge the “formality” promoted by many conventional writing courses. I understand some instructors’ hesitation to employ a new writing platform such as blogs. Highly personalized, blogging in many ways resembles keeping a personal journal. Because of the potential subjectivity, blog posts may not be deemed as convincing as a traditional essay that follows the PIE (points, information and explanation) formula. In the pursuit of writing persuasiveness, however, we oftentimes neglect a basic fact: many students simply do not have a mature or strong idea of the topic when first given a writing assignment. Blog writing in this sense provides us with a public yet highly privatized space to safely formulate our opinions no matter how fragmented they are. In the process of continuous blogging and discussing as a class, students are now able to adjust, refine and affirm their original ideas. And all of these efforts will eventually lead to writing an intellectually sophisticated essay, which is the universal goal of all English classes.
Innovation poses risks, and that was a bullet we had to bite when introducing blogs as the writing medium for this course. I am pleased that our class turned out to be a success, and our blogs shall remain an exciting memory of our college education (if they are not to be deleted at the end of the class).
Sport
16 years ago
1 comment:
I agree in terms of skeptical feeling that you have on the first day. On that day, i wondered when we are writing blogs, can we communicate efficiently to each other? Since we are going to spend our time for paperless writing on the internet, what are we going to do in the class. And the discussion is the answer. From that discussion, we all can go into the subject matter very closely instead of just hearing from the instructor's opinion.
Overall, great post. very articulate.
Post a Comment