Is it a Blog or an e-Portfolio?
Now that I have been exposed to RSS and weblogs in a much deeper way I feel that I can stand back and ponder what I feel about everything. I really like the RSS as it finds me and that can save a lot of time in my day. Quite frankly, the time commitment was the reason I stayed away from blogs in the first place. Now I enjoy looking at our UBC RSS once a day just to see who has posted something new. It really is quick.
John said something in his last weblog post about feeling like a blog is just someone writing to themselves. What is the point of that. If a blog is not a community then I do think it is a waste of time. I tend to think that for me the best use of a blog is for my e-portfolio. It is a great way to organize artifacts. If someone comments on it then great, but that is not the primary point of it.
References
Fisch, K. (2007) Blogging: In Their Own Words. The Fischbowl. Accessed online 26 March 2009.
http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2007/06/blogging-in-their-own-words.html
July 19th, 2011 at 9:20 pm
To add on what I said in the forums:
I started blogging in December 2002. I had finished my PhD weeks earlier and would be moving to Australia for a fellowship in January 2003. Rather than composing emails every week–which might not be of interest to everyone I’d send them too–I decided to give “blogging” a go. So I signed up for a Blogger.com blog (now owned by Google).
It was fine on the strictest functional level: I could post what I want in a way that presented things the way that pleased me. But even though I knew folks at home read my blog, it felt like I was speaking into a great void. My being alone in a new country no doubt magnified this.
Then I came across someone’s LJ blog–wow! Lots of comments! The Friends page to aggregate all sorts of folks’ individual and group LJ blogs (I didn’t understand RSS back then)! Waaaay more interactivity. I felt connected.
Well…once I got an invite. Because in 2003 to get access to LJ required an invite from an existing member. Two years later I had a permanent account and had made connections with folks from all over the world. And, as luck would have it, a whole bunch of the guys I met on an email listserve in the mid 90s all ended up on LJ. So it felt like I had a place there already.
I still check LJ every day, but blog there perhaps once or twice a week. But at its peak I found the feedback I got there invaluable. And my writing improved dramatically!
The. End. 😉
July 19th, 2011 at 11:03 pm
Thanks for the great comment John. I appreciate the time you’ve put into this course. Before this course I had never heard of LJ. I may look into it a bit after 565 is all said and done.