Social Media Bundle

I liked the proactive nature of this project. It forced you to solve problems and figure out how to accomplish task on your own, and in the end I realized that it wasn’t that hard. When you raise the stakes for yourself, it is always a pleasant surprise when you can raise to the challenge.  The most interesting accomplishment was figuring out how to connect all of the social networks together. The widget feature on word press allows you to share your twitter, facebook. and delicious account on your blog. When your blog takes up more space on the internet the more likely someone will stumble across it which I hope gets my blog some more hits! The design elements and voice of my tweets and facebook statuses all involving mastering rhetorical situation and comfort in different in environments.

Activist blog thoughts #2

When I first landed on the topic of my activist blog, I worried that I would not have the material to sustain it for 12 posts. What a fool I was. Modern feminism not only had a constant flow of new material to cover but the material spanned from politics to media to clothes to sports etc…. The effusive nature of the topic left me scrabbling for the right avenue to take with my blog. In order to master the technique of targeting an audience I wanted to close in a certain type of feminism that would be very meaningful to a specific group for people. Though the more I learned about feminism the more I had to say, though my thoughts seemed to cover the span and were not concentrated in one area.The more I had to say the easier posts became to write and the better I felt about their outcome. Though if I had more time with my blog I would hope it became a little more focused.

Activist Blog Thoughts #1

I read a lot of blogs. I also read blogs similar to my own. My hobby of reading feminist blogs when I myself write a feminist blog is both helpful and damaging. In the theater, acting teachers strictly forbid watching another actor play the same part as you. They tell you this, because their voice and choices will have inhabit your own choices, stopping you from naturally discovering a character. In acting and writing I agree and disagree with this notion. Stealing ideas (not like plagiarism, don’t worry academic authorities) can enlighten you to new ideas and possibilities, instead of crippling you, seeing similar work can be down right inspiring. Though, this wide spread belief did not come out of no where. The negative side effects have me struggling for my own ideas and blog posts that are not simply recreations of other pieces that I have read.

wiki travel post-write

The most interesting part of wiki-travel assignment for me was attempting to mirror the style and tone on the Williamsburg page in order to maintain continuity. The wiki travel site has a page aimed at contributors who don’t know exactly the style in which to write. Having read on wiki sites a lot in the past I sort of knew the style they were looking for but it was interesting seeing it explained. The site instructed those making contributions to find a happy balance between conversational am and boring academic writing. Although they say find a happy balance, I find the scale usually tipped toward the academic side. No, the writing is not totally stuffy and boring but it also lacks any indication of flare or fun in the writing. I found containing my naturally cheeky voice hard because I have been indulging in casual writing on my activist blog.

wiki travel thoughts

I think wiki travel accomplishes a lot of relevant lessons for writing majors like myself. I came to realization after thinking back on the slew of essays that have been my sole product during my academic career. Experimenting with different tone of voice in this assignment, not the causality of my blog or an academic essay. My partner and I choice wikitravel which was both a good and bad choice. It was a good choice because of the multitude of information available and not a great choice because it already had a lot of key information on the site before we made additions. Thinking about what contributions would be meaningful and not just more words was the real challenge. In the end, even though we contributed to the sites detail I think the most meaningful thing we did was edit grammatical errors the disrupt the flow and decrease the authors ethos.

Sakai work

Class Critique 12/4

This class uniquely mixes independent learning with in class lectures and to my surprise the former proved to be the most effective for me. I felt the most valuable assignment was the activist blog because it required knowledge on audience and exigency while all dealing with a topic of your choice (I, for one, picked I topic I could write endlessly about) that also demanded time management skills. What I often found frustrating, the amount of work and flexibility of dead lines added up being a beneficial part of the learning experience. Though, in the future I would seek a little rigid structure in the guidelines to ease the minds of students.  The assignments were all helpful and went along with the aim of this course though I didn’t always feel class time was used effectively to help us with the assignments that we were doing on our own. My main suggestion for the future would be to utilize the time in class in a more structured way to balance the fluidity of the assignments. As someone frightened by updated technology, this course illustrated how easy new technologies can be to learn when you know where to look.