Exploring Digital History blog posts were fun, but are coming to an end. 🙁 Here is an analysis of my blog posts for this class.
1. Do you see any broad themes that reoccur in your posts?
Within each of my posts, I found that I have a recurring theme of discussing how valuable the Internet is to society and history. I typically looked at each topic in relation to the Internet on a broad scale and how it impacted the world in its entirety. In order to keep my posts interesting and fun to read, I found myself honing in on topics that I found interesting or compelling so I could create my own interesting points and voice my own opinions on the topic. This led me to discussing the societal impacts that the Internet made – which, as we know, is very significant to understanding our world’s recent history.
2. What adjectives would you use to capture the tone of your posts?
Passionate and creative – two words that I would use to describe the tone of my posts.
I really enjoyed learning about the topics within the class and found it easy to discuss unique items and perspectives of the Internet and digital history that I had not thought of before. Because of this, I was really passionate about what I was writing – genuinely writing about things I was interested in, wanted to talk more about and provide my opinion on.
I liked to let my creative juices flow within my posts. I wanted to write each one differently and discuss different topics with new perspectives and commentary. From waffles, to a battle between digital vs. print, to the death of Twitter…an array of subjects were covered while still remaining relevant to the goal of the course of understanding digital history.
3. What do you think were your strengths? What would you like to have done better?
I believe one of my strengths in writing the blog posts was including my own commentary within the posts to make them seem more conversational and less like an assignment. Sometimes it can be hard to break away from the normal style of writing while still providing good, knowledgeable work; however, I think I did a decent job of balancing the two.
I could have been better at adding more resources within my posts such as more links, pictures or videos. I feel like adding these elements would have elevated my posts to another level.
4. Which do you think was your best blog post? What are the aspects of the post that factor into your assessment?
I really liked my blog post about the Belgian Waffle’s origins at the Seattle World’s Fair. Because it was a fun topic to discuss, I had a lot of fun writing about it too. This led to an interesting blog post that related a yummy breakfast food to digital history! Including the history of the waffle and relating it to wide-scale issues of the world during that time was fascinating to write about, making the blog post one of my favorites. Also, using a picture within the post added another fun element.
5. How was writing online — “thinking out loud” on the web — different from the writing you do to turn in as a formal piece of work?
The style of writing within the blog posts was very freeing to me. Especially as a journalism major, I usually have to stick to a strict script in order to do well on assignments; however, blogs are more conversational and are meant to be more “easy going” or “chill.”
Also, I realized that I could write blog posts much faster than my regular, more formal assignments. Because I am able to “speak my mind,” my words flowed much easier. Other assignments usually take me much longer to complete because I am having to think about special wording and phrasing. This is not the case with blog posts, which I enjoyed!
