Thursday, October 6, 2016

Blog Post Reflections

After briefly reading over my previous blog posts thus far I've come to a conclusion that they do have small "themes" or similarities that tie them to me as a writer more so than to each other. Due to the nature of the prompts  my blog posts are generally about my own experiences. However, within those experiences I try to implement a level of relatability so that readers who are unfamiliar with the topics I write about can still pull my underlying messages out of the text. For example in my blog post entitled "Opportunism" I write about my Track and Field teammate who gave up winning a race to support a rival. While many people may not understand what it's like to compete in a Track and Field event, everyone can imagine what it's like to make a difficult sacrifice. In my blog post "Experience with Organizations and Transaction Costs" I talk about my employment as a Student Patrol Officer. Even though I explained my trainings, duties, and potential situations on the job I don't expect anyone to empathize with student patrol officers. However, I'm sure most people know what it's like to prepare for high pressure situations.

I'm sure there are ways to connect my blog posts to course themes. I believe simply answering the prompts without thinking about how it relates to the course may be rather redundant. With that being said, I do think some prompts felt more difficult to connect to the class than others when I was first given the prompt. In particular the post about opportunism. While I do still feel like I gave an example of opportunism in my post, after dissecting the purpose of talking about opportunism in the following class I realize that I perhaps could have used an example more relatable to the economic of organizations. I didn't give answers to the questions "How can we prevent opportunism?" or "What might be a reason to be and not to be opportunistic?" which are very important topics in economics with regards to opportunism.

I do believe my posts have evolved and will continue to evolve. Initially I felt like I was just answering the prompts and trying to make connections to the course after seeing what I came up with. However, now I see that I should be thinking about both the prompt and how it relates to the course together when writing my posts. Before even writing my posts I've been taking the time to brainstorm and think about how the prompt can be connected to the course. This way my posts don't stray away from what the course is trying to teach.

I would like to see more prompts with no subliminal "correct" answer so that we as students may strengthen our own personal interpretation skills. Being able to think and write without worrying about our grades being penalized as a result of a subjective "correct" answer can sometimes restrict a student's thought bubble. Being afraid of being wrong or of being unsure if Professor Arvan will agree objectively with what I want to write about are extremely limiting feelings. Personally, I really enjoyed the "Illinibucks" prompt because it allowed for relatively open interpretations while still keeping the topic and questions confined. All students were given the same abstract questions, yet our posts were still relatively unique which I enjoyed. In addition, I found myself reading more of other people's posts about "Illinbucks" more so than the other prompts. This is because everyone answered the same questions under the same specific topic of Illinibucks so I was able to compare and contrast other people's opinions easily as opposed to people telling long stories that I generally can't relate to. Having the same topic to write about allows students to communicate different ideas of the same topic easier.

2 comments:

  1. Subliminal correct answer - interesting term. I haven't heard of this expression before. I suppose you mean an answer that you imagine I would deem correct. Assuming that is what you meant, I do wonder whether it is the prompt that causes that or if something else is at play here - your prior experience as a student the obvious other candidate. So let me just point a possible alternative hypothesis to explain your reaction to the Illinibucks prompt, which some other students thought was too vague.

    The alternative is that you are getting used to the blogging now and have a better sense of what it is about than you did at the beginning of the semester. As you relax about that and have a process that works for you, the prompts may seem less about pleasing me, but the real driver is your own improvement and competence in doing this work.

    I liked what you wrote in the penultimate paragraph. It shows that you are doing some prewriting and asking the right sort of questions before you compose a post.

    As a tactic that might help you build more connections across posts in the second half of the course, you might ask whether you have still more to say about the post and the comments from the previous week. If so, you can write a few paragraphs about that and then change gears to write about the current prompt.

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    I put in the dashes to show one way of doing that in your post. You can have sections that are separate. And sometimes reflection about what we already have covered is quite useful. It's a toss up for me whether to have the blogging as a getting ready activity or as a reflection on what we've already done. So if you want, you can do a bit of both.

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    1. While your alternative hypothesis as to why I enjoyed the Illinibucks prompt more than the other prompts does make sense and perhaps may be a factor I don't believe that's the main reason. The other prompts (Teamwork and organization structure, opportunism, and experience with organizations) ask for personal experiences to relate to a topic. I do understand and agree with the idea of applying what we're learning in the course to our lives. However, in previous posts I often caught myself having to expand very much on logistical explanations of my experiences in order for the reader to understand what I'm writing about.

      For example, for two of my posts I wrote about my time in student patrol because I believe it was my best personal experience to fit the prompt. However, the student patrol program isn't a very well known program on campus so in order for me to be able to articulate my connections of student patrol to topics such as teamwork and organization structure (asked for in the prompts) I found myself having to spend, in my opinion, an excessive amount of time trying to explain the program and how it works before I could get to how it relates to what the prompt is asking.

      With the Illinibucks prompt I didn't have to worry about explaining a story or experience. Everyone was given the same prompt about a hypothetical situation where "illinibucks" could be used as a sort of currency to "get ahead of the line". Though the situation and the questions were the same for all students our interpretations and ideas were relatively different. The prompt was narrow enough for me to feel like my written content was all relevant while still wide enough for me to think flexibly and uniquely.

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