Reflexive Summary on Our Blog Based Course
My experience taking part in this class blog was one of mixed results. With this being my first blog to participate in, I didn’t know what to expect. Overall, blogging has challenged me to think in a very different way and taught me about the terminology, graphics, and breaking up of text needed to help put together a clear, informative post. It has certainly inspired me to potentially start a blog or include some sort of blogging aspect to my website (created four years ago).
Some of the parts I think worked well can be described as follows. I found it quite effective to go through the process of listening to a lecture and then summarizing and commenting on it through a blog post. I found most of the topics of the lectures to be relevant and thought the concept to have self-directed meetings was well thought out. I liked the idea of pacing out the posts across each week, however, I think this didn’t allow for some of the people posting near the beginning to choose from a lecture that legitimately interested them. I think a possible way to address this could be sending out the general topics and layout of the lectures in advance to help people choose the week on which they would like to post. I also think the continuous feedback was a strong way to ensure we stayed on track and understood the effective way to compile our posts. A concluding aspect of what I found worked well is the reasonable required length of the posts along with the expectation of the post to pose an argument fore or against a specific theme discussed in the lecture.
With the positive inevitably comes the negative. The biggest issue that is specific to me is the fact of the matter that this course was scheduled on the same day and at the same time as my Architecture Design Studio (ARC8085), a course that holds more value due to the nature of my Master of Architecture degree. It is extremely disappointing that Urban Design is offered as a stream to MArch students, yet there is zero co-ordination between the two departments. The result is that I wasn’t able to attend most of the lectures or meetings. That being said, the ReCaps of each lecture were quite effective in allowing me to follow along and pause them as needed. I also found that some of the lecturers selected spoke in a very matter-of-the-fact manner, not allowing for much of a discussion to occur afterwards. I think this also played a role in the lack of critiquing taking place in the blog posts. A final area to improve on would be the assessment around the ice-breaker posts and our class’s layout of the overall website. I feel it would be more effective if marks were allocated toward these two aspects to help push us to put more of our creative energy to use.
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