Just Blog It!

Create a blog! My first impressions were very negative and I probably would not have signed up for this class if I knew we were required to set one up. I first created a blog in college and found it not to be very exciting. However, I wanted to be in this class and wanted to give blogs another go so decided to start fresh in my mind about blogs. After this second assignment I am very impressed with how RSS reader organizes your blogs and gives you feeds that you can read in a matter of minutes. The reason I didn’t like blogs before was the information moved to slow and everybody’s blog started to look the same. I would read one blog after another with no breaks or different forms of information given to the reader. Now you can subscribe to several different forms of media and see what people are into. I enjoy the pictures, videos, and links in the news feeds. I am so glad that my negative thoughts didn’t cause me to stop taking this class. This blogging thing is pretty cool.
I really enjoyed the Cone of Experience article and will often think about modes of learning with the analogy of tying a shoe. Creating a blog first had a huge impact on my learning and understanding of why people set up a blog. I would not have appreciated RSS reading without creating a blog first. By getting the direct experience of a blog I was more motivated to subscribe to others blogs and professional blogs. I did not realize there was such a large social network of bloggers with several different forms of information to share.  I had a hard time deciding which facets of the Cone lend itself better to blogging or RSS reader because both complement each other so well. However you can organize and exhibit everything better from your RSS reader. The RSS reader is a richer experience with the user able to find media in writing, recordings, radio and still pictures. By using RSS reader the user is able to demonstrate a more abstract view on their interests. You can make the RSS reader into anything you want. (Basically you are like an artist and starting on a clean canvas) Students would learn so much more about themselves and about others as learners from using a RSS reader. The article talked a lot about different style learners and I think visual learners would be able to learn better from the RSS reader. I am more of a visual learner and the RSS reader is way more appealing than just reading a blog.
An educational use for a blog would be a pen pal program to learn from people with a variety of background knowledge. Students can learn from experiences from other students and can even start a pen pal program with students from other countries. I think by talking to someone living in another country would be a rich experience to learn about similarities and differences between cultures. Rss reader would be a good place for students to compile sources to write a paper. The teacher could easily check how the student compiled there information. Rss reader would be a rich way to use a variety of sources. Checking sources and using firsthand knowledge from pen pals would help solve the problem of text books being biased or misrepresented a group of people. I have seen at our school who is 98% African American our students have a low perception of the country of Africa. One student told me he never wants to visit Africa because everyone is poor and lives in a village. Maybe blogs could help widen his knowledge on the different countries in Africa that are not shown in books or on commercials. I think blogs and the Rss reader can help student’s maybe hone in and narrow there search because like the article talked about there is so much information out there. Rss reader like Amazon helps students get reviews on different countries and students can save the important information in an easy format.