Blogging Reflection

Blogging reflection

Well here it is, the end of the fall semester. Now that the final week of class is upon us and next week next week are finals I know everyone is busy with cramming for finals, or completing projects, etc.  but I want to take some time to reflect on the semester as a whole. I’m not only going to reflect on my life this past semester but I am going to go into detail reflecting specifically on the blogging I was required to do for my EH-101 class.

This semester has been full of ups and downs in both class and football but I can say I have truly enjoyed it. I have been blessed with professors I enjoyed and opportunities to  learn in ways I hadn’t before. Within the semester I have made the decision to transfer schools next semester in order to pursue a degree not offered here at JSU but as I move on to my new University there are things I will be taking with me from my time here at JSU. One class and professor I will most definitely remember and carry with me as I pursue a different path for my life is the hybrid EH-101 class with Mrs. Sasser.

Going into the semester I wasn’t sure what the hybrid next to EH-101 meant and when I asked people on my team the answer I got was it was going to be a class that you only went to every other week or so. This statement was true for my class, but what I found out was it meant so much more. In the class Mrs. Sasser truly challenged us to learn on our own and to embrace technology to its fullest potential as a learning tool. These were things I hadn’t ever done before honestly and at first the idea was foreign. As the semester progressed I saw myself grow to learn and problem solve on my own instead of expecting someone else to hand me the answer. I feel like this change was truly brought on by the blogging workshops that we did each week along with the blog posts. I had never blogged before but thoroughly enjoyed it once I began.

From my blog posts I had a handful of favorites that I wrote. I felt like through those specific ones I showed both my strengths and weaknesses. If I had to choose one post that showed the most about myself as a writer I feel like it’d have to be the first blog post I did, “All about me”. The post was of course the easiest to complete because it was simply about me but I feel like I had real strong points within that post. As a writer I feel like one of best attributes is my honesty and directness with what I write, I mean what I say exactly and nothing else. I feel like this was definitely something I did well in “All about me” especially when I said “My life can be summarized by three simple words God, family, & friends with those being in order of importance to me.” That sentence is simple, yet says a lot within it. To some this directness in such a simple statement is not necessarily a strength but to me without a doubt it is. I say this because so much in writings we see people try and use these big words that nobody understands and it ends up hurting them rather than helping.

Another one of my favorite blog posts would definitely be Blog post #3. For me the topic was challenging, “what is college good for?” It was a question that I had never really thought about because to me college was a given due to my desire to further my football career. The challenging topic ended up revealing one of my biggest strengths, which has come to be how I incorporate research, and quotes that I find. In this post I had to research the topic because I didn’t know much about it and many things I found were good so when I used them I needed to cite them and be sure to incorporate them seamlessly. I think a good example of this strength would be when I used a quote from an article I found when researching, “Although a college education can prepare you for many things there are also things that college cannot do for you. Bobby Fong says “A college may not always be able to anticipate what technical skills students will need ten years from now. Thirty percent of you will one day work in jobs that don't yet exist. Studies show that nationally, 60 percent of students graduate in majors different from those in which they began. Your generation will change careers seven times over a lifetime.” in his article Don’t Miss the College Forests for the Career Trees.” I think the way I placed the quote into my post without being choppy shows the strength I was talking about.

            Last but not least is my most recent post when I got to completely revise and add to a post made previously. This gave me a chance to improve upon prior work and in this case add a whole new side to my argument. For me the ability to write for both sides of an argument without being biased is easy and I think it is something that I benefit from a writing strength. In the post I argued that college was both “good enough” & “not good enough”. I was able to do this because after I went back and did further research and found new opinions I realized that both sides made sense so I used both arguments in one post. I feel like this would make readers happier because I wasn’t being biased or picking sides as you’d expect someone to do on a topic.

            All in all the blogging this semester was not only a learning experience, it was and eye opening one for me because I saw that I had the resources needed to solve any problem or answer any question I had. I just had to work and find what I was looking for. I want to thank Mrs. Sasser for this semester because I feel like it really has improved me as a student and as an independent person.