Diaspora Dialogs [.com]

The experience of blogging and working with the wiki has been very positive for me. I have actually taken online courses before, but they were, to say the least a bit awkward. The course was a distance learning type of course in which everything from grades to discussions were done online. This type of approach of using online tools as a teaching device really does not work. I felt alienated to some extent because I literally never saw my professor till the last day of class, when she came to pick up our final papers. The course consisted of so-called class discussions that were mini-blogs that we had to respond to and reading assignments coupled with papers of all sorts (e.g. persuasive essays, research papers, etc.) Although I was introduced to some very interesting literature and short stories (e.g. The Death of a Salesman), the overall experience wasn’t very exciting or enriching.

With that in mind, I was a little hesitant about starting another online-based course. However, this course, I strongly believe, has saved the reputation of using the internet as a teaching tool. This course is probably one of the most interesting and truly fun courses I’ve taken in a while. One of the key features that make this course so enjoyable is the type of informal atmosphere associated with the online world. I love the fact that Professor A-S gave us the freedom to create our own pages, while seriously writing about topics. In this course, there was definitely an intangible quality that didn’t make assignments seem so nerve-wrecking. We met twice a week in a round-table like manner and discussed readings and issues and later went back and worked on expressing our ideas formally. Now that I think about it, this was truly one of the few times in my life where I felt the professor treated the students as mature adults- it was amazing really, because I felt respected and not pressured about meeting deadlines.

Because of this set-up, I really was comfortable with writing whatever I felt like and writing at lengths sometimes. I really gained a comfortable handle on tackling writing assignments and this course has given me a strong confidence in sharing my ideas in the public domain (which I absolutely have no problem with). In fact, I believe that knowing your work will be viewed by many other people encourages you to write at your very best. If I had to describe the course, I would say it was a gathering of intellectuals with the goal of discussing a certain historical topic and having fun learning and writing. With that being said, I believe that I would like to keep on sharing my thoughts and work with others in this same format and hopefully, I will experience other courses of this style during my life, because I truly believe this is one of, if not the best way to teach young adults.

Writing for this course has brought me way out of my convential methods of writing - and it has been unsettling. Beneficial and helpful of course - but all the same unsettling. I have always been a supporter of snail mail and old fashioned marble notebooks and pencils. There are many different reasons for this - some of which have been mentioned in previous in blogs. It was necessary to enforce in me that there were serious, academic ways of communicating ideas through the use of the internet and blogs.

I am always willing to share my work and my efforts with other people - it is one of my biggest joys to help other people and watch them learn. But in this context, I beleive credit is due. Not only did we do a lot of research and a great deal of creative, original writing, we are one of the first classes based on a website and must set a precedent. I think this is one of the most important concepts we must recognize. In the future when scientific experiments and processes, in depth research papers and other academic documents are shared online - they need to be properly documented and cited. I do not mind sharing - I am more than willing to share and the site should be open to the public. But I think that more for the originality other individuals in this class - like John's guitar piece, Noah's poem or Skyler's video - this site needs to be properly protected with copyrights and a notice to the viewer(s).

-Erin Allen

Although I had to adapt to the style of this course, I feel it gave me an opportunity to experience a different type of learning as it is not commonly used. I think the internet is the most powerful tools we have and it is very accessible. By utilizing this resource, blogging and through the wiki, we are adding to this unlimited pool of knowledge. Each year, the internet has become more powerful and important to today’s society as it is something we now rely on. I wish more classes would start utilizing the internet and using such tools like the wiki in the education system.

I don’t mind sharing my thoughts online. I think when people share each others’ work everybody benefits. As long as people aren’t stealing each others’ work like plagiarizing and getting credit for it then there shouldn’t be a problem. People shouldn’t need passwords to view our wiki. What’s the worst they can do if they so what we wrote? Maybe learn something.

To be honest, I would have preferred not to have to take any First-Year Writing Seminar courses, but since that was not an option, I'm glad that I ended up in this one. I enjoyed working online, both for this blog and for the wiki. This blog has allowed me to consider and communicate my ideas about issues that are important today. I don't think I would have been able to do that in a paper-philic course about, say, Native American medicine. I also believe the wiki to be superior to printed essays and books. As discussed on the Fusion page, the wiki is a more dynamic teaching tool. I have felt much more engaged by our topics because of the music, images, and documentaries that we have watched or listened to throughout the course.

As for security, I'm rather apathetic. I would not protest if what I had written became public. At the same time, I would not argue if the university preferred to keep it private. It seems rather silly to have created a website that cannot be shared on the web, but I have no problem classifying it as "practice" for myself.

Regardless, I suppose you will still use the wiki (or a cleaned-up version) for future courses. Professor, good luck with your "margarita goal." We've already proved paper to be unnecessary, so you're well on your way.

I have never tried an online course before I chose this class. Compared to usual English class in which papers are handwritten, the experience of blogging and wiki-ing is fresh to me. I believe the art of writing is multifaceted. Conventional writing and modern blogging are all part of what we should study. Despite positive attributes are usually accompanied by negative attributes, just like blogging can leads to plagiarism, working on internet can give us many advantages while conventional writing cannot do. Usually in conventional writing class, works are just shared between a teacher and individual student. I found it interesting to look at other people’s work and discuss with them. Maybe some people would mind sharing ideas, however as for me, I have learned much from classmates as well as professor. Since most youths today use internet, blogging will probably be as important as writing on paper in the future.

Noah Van Horne

There is no question that overall, working online has made our education cleaner. Also important, in my case at least, is that it has forced me to spend extensive amounts of time exploring and learning about how to navigate the virtual world successfully, and therefore it has forced me to learn how to use what is already the world's new direction of evolution. Aside from this factor, I feel strongly that working online allowed all of us participants to interact on our own time, and to use as much time as we wished to allocate to any given assignment. This provided the opportunity for each student to work in whatever way they found to be most effective. (Although I know that I tend to tap creativity better under the pressure of a deadline, I don't think that this is the case for many people).

As far as the blog is concerned, I think that using the blog was a very effective way of allowing everyone to access the opinions of other. Not only did this facilitate conceptual sharing, but I know that it forced me to think creatively. Aside from the obviously thought-provoking subjects we broached, this is due to the fact that often, the same idea would occur to several people including myself. When this happened, to avoid redundancy, I had to think of something new to say and bring to the blog exchange. From my experience this does not happen as much in class discussions because verbally, people feel that if they say the same thing in different words, then it counts as something new. This repetitiveness is less easily concealed in writing.

Finally, on the subject of our work being public. While I agree with Erin about our rights to what we have created, I believe that none of us ever had the intention of using our productions for personal profit (unless you count grades I suppose). So for our case, I see no harm in sharing everything that we made. I suppose that the other aspect is student privacy from family, etc. But in this respect I think that it would take a truly crazy parent to find their child's work and then give their child a hard time about it. Granted, I am sure that such people exist. But I for one just do my best to work around and ignore such people, and I believe that everyone is capable of overcoming this adversity if it means gaining the common benefit of giving the public access to our educational resource.

Thanks again for this class professor A.S. Have a good rest of the year!!!

Just as the online experience of writing and blogging is new to you, it is similarly new to us. Having our work immediately on display for all others to see perhaps increases the time, effort, and care that we put into our work. Additionally, the fact that our work can be edited countless times online further adds to the learning process involved with writing. While I do believe that there are some minor problems with having our work online, such as the sharing of ideas, I believe that overall it is a better process than handing in physical papers. The online process has provided us with further discussion and development of the webpage as a whole. Overall I prefer the online mode of transferring ideas as we are able to access and change our work at any time.