Making Connections

Throughout the course there has been a lot of reflections in our Blog posts, and many of my classmates have commented on how the very nature of posting to the Blog has made them reflect on how they do so. Some individuals get right into it and type directly into the Blog, others type their entire post in a word document first, to be edited and polished before posting, and others do a mixture of the two methods or alternate between one method or the other depending on the topic or nature of that particular post or comment.

The very act of reading and commenting on each other’s posts requires us to reflect and express who we are, what we believe, and what knowledge and ideas we hold and/or chose to change. I really like how Bolter (2001, p.190) describes this as, “…we write both to express, to discover, and to share who we are, and in a postmodern age our written identity is, like hypertext, dynamic, flexible, and contingent”.

I have appreciated the use of tagging specific words within our posts to organize and categorize our topics and key words as it made it much easier to jump to similar-topic discussions. The diversity and creativity of topics, images, and ideas that have formed our online collection is stunning. There have been a lot of images and videos used in the Blog posts, not more or even equal to the amount of text (which has been massive!), but there has definitely been a “breakout of the visual” (Bolter, 2001). With the ease of uploading or linking these visual forms of representation, our Blog has become a visual world which has allowed us in many cases (my own posts included) to simply let the image or the video ‘do the talking’ and express the point we were trying to get across to our peers. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.  This was the case in the following posts:

The Media Revolution by Ashley Jones

Technology by Liz Hood

Melding the two T’s by Drew Ryan

New technology, old concept by Ashley Jones

Technology – definition by Lindsey Martin

Shedding the light on the meaning of technology by Ashley Jones

A matter of metaphor by Peg

Working smarter not harder by Ed Stuerle

Technology = system by Erin Gillespie

Derrida and writing by Stuart Edgar

Text by Stuart Edgar

Text by Liz Hood

Text we R, text i Am by Svetlana Gibson

Text by Noah Burdette

Text us…. by Ana Cecilia Tagliapietra

Although I have chosen to focus on the connections made on the Blog site, I have also really enjoyed using Vista and the Wiki. Using three different platforms has allowed for different methods of expression, high levels of creativity and an increase in the sharing of knowledge. Thank-you everyone for the excellent contributions and feedback, from which I have learned so much!

Resource:

Bolter, D.J. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print.London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.