Blog Revisions

Once completed with the initial survey, I realized that I had a few major flaws in my web site that needed to be addressed. The first thing I went through and fixed was the lack of tags in a few of my posts. While I had tags for all of my posts, there was room for more detailed tags to draw more traffic through the page. I then went through each of my posts and changed the title to be more descriptive of the piece rather than the generic titles I previously had like, “Reading Summary #1.” I changed both of these so that my submissions could be more accessible and easily found by my peers.

 

What I wasn’t able to revise, but I would like to address, includes multi-media. A few of my posts did indeed include a photo or two, but as a whole my blog is pretty bare. More images would provide more detail to my posts and make the over all look of my blog more attractive. Just like the need for more media my blog could use more structure and design. I wish I had taken the time to play around with the theme of the blog and font to create a different atmosphere. Currently my blog is just a collection of information, whereas if it had been designed differently it could create a completely different tone and message with each of its posts.

 

 

 

Mid Term Reflection

 

 

 

The academic writing process in this class is different from the way in which i have learned in the past in the nature of the writing. The writing in this class specifically involves research and personal opinion, whereas in the past i have mostly worked on narratives and persuasive essays. It has taken me a while to get use to writing reading summaries in essay format, but once i reached the third reading summary I felt more comfortable with the style of writing. I was also able to teach my self a better strategy at approaching the summaries. I have learned to first read through the writing before attempting to annotate, and then once annotating only leave information that remains relevant throughout the reading. This helps me complete the assignments faster by only focusing on relevant informations that will be included in my summary. Annotated bibliographies are also new to me and so it took me a little extra effort to understand the concept of the assignment. Now that i have completed and submitted the assigned bibliographies i understand the task and find it quick and easy to complete.

Due to the manner in which we submit our work, being a post on a public blog, the audience of our work is not limited to the professor or even our classmates. Any one with access to the internet can read our submissions. The information we post becomes more than an assignment to the class, but a published piece of information for public use. This makes completing the assignments to the best of our abilities more crucial because it not only reflects our knowledge and work ethic to our professor, but to the world. It is posted to the internet with our name, and therefore represents us to any future employers or graduate schools.

I have found weaknesses in my focus when completing reading summaries. I constantly become distracted or overwhelmed by the amount of reading remaining. I have learned to remain focused by reading aloud or enlarging the text. This has made an improvement on my comprehension of the readings and therefore the summaries in which i have written. I want to continue working on this comprehension so to then further improve my reading summaries.

I have found that, due to the need for improvement in my writing abilities and work ethic, I strongly require participation in extra point opportunities to make up for lost points. So far i have created a bio page on my blog, and have created a Facebook study group page with two of my peers. I have plans to complete many more extra point opportunities in order to achieve success in this course. I am content with the effort in which i have put into the class so far; however, I feel like i have much room for improvement and i genuinely want to succeed. In order to improve my effort put into the class, I plan to begin working on my assignments earlier so that if i do become distracted or have a hard time focusing i can take a step back and resume when i have more focus. I believe this will help me complete better writings.