School Assignment

As this is a blog I'm keeping only for school purposes, at least for now, here is the assignment I  neededto do. The teacher gave us an article to read and comment. The article Weblogs: Learning in Public is written by Jill Walker from University of Bergen, Norway, and published in 2005 in On the Horizon Vol 13, Issue 2, pages 112-118.

In the article Walker tells about her own experiences in making students write a blog. There were some students who were writing their blogs enthusiastically, but most of the students were doing only the things they were told to. I think it's the same with our class. Some students already had a blog, which they were updating quite frequently, but most of us just tried to figure out what we would write in our blogs.

It's mentioned in the article that people write differently when they know who is reading their text and I agree with that. I sometimes write the school assignments with my left hand and just hope to get a passing grade, since only one person is reading them. And to tell the truth, with this assignment I was about to do the same. But then I started thinking: "Wait a sec. All my classmates can see what I write here. Do I want to give them an impression that I'm lazy or something? Maybe I should really think what I'm writing here and how much." I think peer pressure is quite a good motivator. At least it works for me.

An important issue on the article is also the fact that you should really think what you can write on your blog, since anyone can see it. There is mentioned this man who wrote about very personal things on his blog and when someone wrote a review of his blog, he was surprised (and not in the good way) that someone is not only reading his blog, but also reviewing it. He hadn't really realized that people can see what he writes there. I had a bit similar situation when I was still not-so-bright teenager. I wrote about stupid things that happened in school during the days in MySpace, since the only people who could see it were my classmates, who already knew about the things. When I stopped writing them, I just left them there and forgot about their existence. A couple of years later, when I had many new people able to read it, I went to see the page again and realized that the stupid stuff was still there. Now everything is deleted, but I still don't know, if any of the new people had read it or not.

To conclude, I think the article was very useful. It made me really think about all the aspects of publishing your text on the web. And frankly, a part of me kind of wants to write a blog... But still, I have to consider it VERY thoroughly, since I easily write more than I'm supposed to. And to all my dear classmates who might think I'm just a quiet Finn - I can be quite a rattler when there's no one to interrupt me. ;)