Blogging to Enhance Learning Experiences: February 12-25, 2007

The mix of students is fairly broad. A large number of students fill out the minim amount of work required, and a few, as in all courses, do none or next to nothing and as a consequence either dropped out or scored extremely low. Others enthusiastically seek out more work to do, while a portion of the students involved have picked up the ball and run with it. One of whom is Marc (Ghettoman) who has used his Live Journal not only to document his work through the semester and explore his own ideas, but also to develop his own artistic personality and distil his concepts and first hand knowledge of art and literature for when he becomes a teacher.

I’ve found Live Journal a release for my writing, as well as a challenging new medium. Prior to my first year of uni I had almost no experience using the net, and am still discovering common tasks and having problems fulfilling them. But the advent of Live Journal forced me to confront technology and think about it in new ways. For many students it was a shock, my self included - thinking of English literature as being a traditional course concerned with dusty volumes and large books filled with dead poets and writers.

With the help of friends and other students and a touch of ambition I was able to get to grips with the new technology and start utilising it for expressing myself, sharing ideas and using creativity as a learning medium. This cultivated in the second semester in the body of work I created blending basic filming teqniques with poetry and narration, a lot of the inspiration for the work coming from the hyper-media we were and had been studying, along with more traditional texts of poetry and prose.

It also gave me the motivation to keep going to Uni and get through the year when problems and crises arose at home because I was able to talk about them with other students I had become familiar with through Live Journal and didn’t feel alienated or disaffected when the work got hard because other people were writing about their problems and the difficulty of the work as well.

I’ve posted up some of my work in my latest entry http://dr-mindbender82.livejournal.com/ for genral intrest

I joined a Philosophy community last year and have learnt a stack of stuff about 21st century philosophy which I wouldn't have known otherwise. I think what makes it so powerful an academic tool is you can put your ideas down somewhere and get feedback from them, rather than just carrying them around in your head and waiting for a chance to write a paper or submitting them in an essay.

Also you can converse with people in text which is a huge difference to doing it verbally as it's often impossible to convey many of the subtleties and intricacies of what you are saying face to face, which is how writers and scholars have been doing it for hundreds of years, just without the advent of speed and such a quick reply.