Reflexive piece

Reflexive piece

This term was quite difficult compared to the first term, the group work mad things even more difficult because you would find that when you are free and want to do some work, your group members will be busy. I had to sacrifice most of my nights to make sure that the work is done and walking alone in the dark was quite frightening for me, since I don’t have a laptop I am the one who always had to go to other people’s places in order to do group work. It was not always easy to try and link things to certain genres but at the end I had to do my best because I had no other choice. Nothing really encouraged me to be more productive, everything I did was because I wanted to pass this course but the examples that were given at the beginning of every assignment really helped me produce the best that I could.

I developed my stories within the scopes that were given and I think that really worked well for me but it wasn’t easy and it took a lot of thinking. The meetings that I had with my group went well most of the times, whenever we had contradictions we voted and we used the majority voted idea. Trying to follow my blog character really made things difficult for me at certain times because you would find that I didn’t really want to follow my blog character but I had to. This in some way limited me to what I was writing and I know that if I wasn’t so limited I would have done so much better. On a scale of one to ten I would give this course seven out of ten for my personal growth. I was able to go through a lot of challenges in this course especially the technical side of things, I am so not computer friendly and struggled to the very much to do the technical staff.

Things changed a lot in this course because whatever I was writing, I did not really have control of who reads it or who doesn’t so I had to be really careful and try to be professional at all times. It was not like the other assignments that we did before which were just between the tutor and the writer. Linking genre to every piece of writing was quite a hassle but eventually I did what was expected of me. I think that blogging is journalism especially because you are free to post any issue that you feel need to be raised and most journalists do blogging to improve their skills and get feed back from the audience about how they are doing. Blogging also allows other people to engage in discussing things and raise their concerns and opinions. I think blogging takes you further than just a journalist working for a newspaper, radio or TV by allowing you to just express yourself with no sharp eye looking over what you are doing and trying to make changes or even suggest your story is not good enough.

The strengths for the theme given were, we could come up with good stories about first year because we are currently in first year and are experiencing what the future first years might go through. We were able to advice better and I am sure that the future first years would rather hear from the recent first years about what is going on in first year than being told by people who have been in first year quite some time ago. The weaknesses were, at times it was difficult to stick to the theme because I would have totally different ideas and stories that I would have loved to post in my blog but I couldn’t because I was limited. I also found it very difficult to focus on blogging at all times since we were given so many assignments because journ is not the only subject that I am doing and yet all my time was used up while I was trying to keep up with it. Blogging is a great course and it would make better sense if first years did it at the beginning of the year where there is less work because fourth term is a short term and there is already a lot to do and blogging made things worse.

Knowing that anyone could be reading my blog made me want to check each and every fact of my stories before publishing them to my blog and I had to use the best information that I had at all times. The research has taught me to use accurate information at all times. I was lucky to have reliable sources with the stories I wrote and it wasn’t really a problem to find these people because I used students from this university, I just had to pick the right people not just anyone. I tried my best to express myself in genre terms and I think that it worked well. My main concern about blogging is the time if it is given at a good time it is a good course but please don’t ever make it in fourth term again. Overall I am proud of myself because I was able to come this far and my blogging experience was successful.