self-critique blog post

I have written many blogs in my first semester here at NC State but I have a best and a worst I believe. My best blog post is the propaganda blog post, I put everything I thought and felt into that blog post and even got to put up my own propaganda for everyone to see. My worst would be gender and bathrooms because it wasn't very easy to elaborate on. The signs represented themselves, making my blog post just repetitive. As a blogger I have learned to put my thoughts out there in a very self monitoring fashion, that is very important to me. After this course I do not believe I will blog anymore, my form of blogging is Facebook I believe. My relationship has grown fonder with blogging. I don't see it as a thing that just weird kids do anymore, it really means something to some people and its a good "out". I'm glad I got to experience it.

response essay blog post

I am going to respond to Lana Chiad's essay entitled "The Lord's Army". I am going to counter this argument by arguing that religion is not forced down the throats of American children. I do not believe that this is true, in turn for my first point I believe that children are taught the religion of their families and later on once they truly understand that religion, they can choose for themselves whether or not they believe it to be true. My second point I plan to argue is that religion is not taught to children to keep them from being psychotic murderer, it is taught to children because it is what their parents believe and it is important to them, therefore they teach it to them and hope they believe in it for the sake of believing in a higher power. My third point I plan to argue is that not every christian couple is going to brainwash their child into hysteria about God.

challenging media

I took the time to watch Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image of Women because of the little side note Ms. Clark wrote about one of the images being a photoshopped picture of Gisele Bundchen claiming that it was a model with anorexia that had died in 2006, Ana Carolina Reston. You do not have to be a genius to figure out that the picture is of Gisele and if you have ever seen Gisele you would know that her body absolutely looks nothing like the body portrayed in the photo. This is another case of "lets make models look like starving victims of society and make everyone against them". Yes, the media, television, magazines and more often have skinny or fit women in their ads but this to me does not say "all women need to be this size" when women are put in ads so skinny they are often wearing something or near something that is trying to be sold. This to me says "if you wear this product you will look good just like these women". It is enforcing the product, not the model's body weight. I hope that Jean Kilbourne realizes that she has made a complete fool of herself by falsely advertising Gisele as an anorexic model. Everyone knows what Gisele looks like, if you have seen a show or a Victoria Secret ad, it is apparent who she is. I guess Jean Kilbourne thinks that everyone viewing this slideshow of hers is an idiot because not only did she use Gisele as an anorexic Ana Reston, but she used an ad in which Gisele was in earlier in the slide show with her REAL body. In one part of the slide show it was real Gisele, then a photoshopped Gisele saying that she was a different person. This woman, Jean Kilbourne, has completely false information and speaks only of her opinions of women and the images in the media. I trust nothing that this woman may say or do. If Jean Kilbourne told me the sky was blue I can honestly say I would have to go outside and look up. If she wants to be taken seriously in the fight against anorexia like she says she does then she should definitely not use false photos and should focus more on real life situations and if the images of women on tv affected them or not. But in anorexia, the false body image does not come from super models on tv, it comes from a distorted image of themselves in their own mind. I find it ridiculous that Jean Kilbourne thinks she can blame models and tv ads for anorexia in America because that simply is not true. I truly wish that Kilbourne would just do some research of her own for data, numbers, statistics, real life stories, ANYTHING to make her statements plausible. I completely do not agree with Jean Kilbourne in this matter and hope she learns to use real information some day.

dissenting voices

I do not completely agree with the article I read today, published on the front page of the New York Times. The article was entitled "Deep Rifts Divide Obama and Republicans", which spoke of the Republican win over the house and their gains in the senate. President Obama and the Republicans have vowed to work together toward great progress in the country but their divide in policy is making this harder than expected. When reading this article I was genuinely interested but something immediately caught my eye in the second paragraph of the article. I am accustomed to and I'm sure most people are that we call our President "President Obama". When I read the article, the writers Peter Baker and Carl Hulse refer to him as "Mr. Obama". I was appalled when I saw this. Not only does this take away his title as President but it makes him seem like an inconspicuous street walker that could be any man. This is THE President of the United States of America, this was a pretty bold move to strip him of his title in an article displayed on the front of the New York Times, perhaps the most popular news paper in the country. This was not just a preference of name calling by the writers or a "uh oh", this was an intentional attack and I am surprised and appalled that the editor of this article let it be published like this. I am not a huge fan of Obama, I am a Republican and also disagree with a lot of his policies but I feel that he deserves the respect to be called President, the title that he rightfully won. As I kept reading it became completely apparent to me that the writers were indeed attacking President Obama. They looked upon every word of our President and found something negative about it. They made it way too obvious that they are against him in policies. I thought that most news articles, especially front page articles, weren't supposed to be bias or controversial. When I read "More conciliatory than contrite, Mr. Obama used that phrase, “take responsibility,” six times but rejected the suggestion that his policies were moving the country in the wrong direction." I knew that it was a direct attack to the President and the article may not have anything to do with the Republicans and President Obama working together but having different opinions in policy but it was intentionally written and published due to their personal want to bash the President. Our Capitol is struggling and to be honest, fractured because of the differences between so many people running our country. Everyone is going to have to agree on something in the end, and negativity is not appreciated or helping at a time like this. The American people must come together in times like this.

Online Interaction Blog Post

Blog posts were a different experience for me. I do not feel that blog posts are an effective extension of conversation outside of the physical class room. Since we have prompts and specific questions (which I like because it gives me something specific and an outline to write on) but it does not follow the same structure of a flowing conversation that we might have with one another in class. Also, when commenting, we are communicating back to other students but I don't feel as if anyones comments aregenuine, I feel like the comments are just something that is thrown out there because we have to do them. Blog posts sometimes feel pointless but at other times help us engage with the material you want us to read and learn about. But when it comes to blogs acting in place of conversation that might take place in class, it is not the same whatsoever. Comments are not serving as a good way to start an interesting conversation. As I said before, I do not think the comments are genuine, I just believe they are something that is merely said because it is required of us. Plus, I'm pretty sure like half the class forgets to comment because it is hard to remember. I'd much rather do blog posts than forum discussions mainly because of the format of the forum discussions. They are extremely confusing and hard to figure out where to put text and it was just difficult and frustrating for me. To improve the blog posts (if your goal is to make it more like a conversation that you might have in the class room) I would make the blog posts more opinion based instead of just, answer this question, then answer this one. Make it like how do you feel about this, what do you think about this. That is how a conversation goes anyway. Structure it around the way a normal conversation would be structured. Blog posts are creative and a great way to engage in the material to be learned but the information would probably settle more in our minds if the posts were discussed in class and the information was revisited.

qualitative research concerns

I can't lie, I am more worried about this paper than the rest that we have had so far. I am worried about writing open-ended questions. It was hard enough to do in class with two friends about a simple movie and now I am going to have to do it by myself and incorporate those questions into my paper about a story of my own choice. This scares me! Open-ended questions are not easy to write or to answer in my opinion. I feel it may be hard to stay away from quantitative methods because they are simple and truly easier than qualitative methods. It is much easier to report numbers and simple data and facts than to have to report feelings and thoughts and answers to difficult questions. On the other hand, conducting qualitative research is a very eye opening experience and will show people like me how other people feel about a story being changed from one medium to another. I will also be conducting this qualitative research in many different ways like conducting interviews, observing and reading data. This is will give me a much more broad perspective of the data and what people think about the story I am conducting research on. Qualitative research goes in much more depth than quantitative research does. It shows the thought processes of the people being interviewed, how they feel and what they think when all that quantitative research shows are statistics, numbers, and data that must be interpreted to be understood. I expect to encounter many challenges and obstacles when writing this paper as I anticipate it to be very work intensive and probably give me a few headaches. I expect to be stuck deciding which story to pick to conduct my research on. There are tons of stories that have been converted from one medium to another and I am very indecisive, which is not a good combination at all. Also, coming up with open-ended questions is very difficult for me, I even had trouble in class with it when I had friends to help me come up with some questions. I expect that conducting the research itself is going to a pain in the butt! There is so much that goes into this paper that I know I must be very organized with all of my information and even my thoughts. Writing is difficult for me, and organizing the information in my paper I know will be very difficult for me, to figure out what goes where. I know that once this research paper is done and over with I will be proud of myself because it is going to be a lot of work but I also know that because it is a lot of work I am going to want to procrastinate a ton just to put all of the work off. I am going to work very hard, however, to not procrastinate. This is a paper that can't be put together in two days and will take a lot of time to conduct the research, put it all in its place and write the paper with sophistication and style. I am going to have to put everything aside for a little while and focus purely on this paper because to me, it is a big deal since it proposes so many challenges.

writing about learning

I can always tell when I've learned something from an experience. I usually end up learning things the hard way and that is through experience. So if I learn not to do something from a bad experience then I won't do that thing again or if something turns out great I may do it again. I always realize when I have learned something from a course that I am in. Later on in the course or in a different course I can always look back on things I know and have learned and use them in whatever I am doing at that time. I often use what I have learned when I am talking to my friends about school or about their assignments and I can use what I know to help my friends. The evidence I look at to answer those questions are whether I can use what I learn in everyday life and even when I move on from that course or that experience, I still know what I learned and can use it to my advantage. I think that when we learn things that transform our beliefs and alter our lives then they are more often remembered and used in the future. I remember my senior year in english class I had a teacher that made us talk about religion. I fought for what I believe in and so did the people in my class. My beliefs weren't altered because I believe what I always have but it made my beliefs stronger as well as gave me a chance to see what other people believed. Growing up in my family and in the church I never heard much of other people's beliefs and what they are willing to fight for and that conversation in my english class and learning what I did has stuck with me. I remember everything that was said that day. When I learn things that don't have such an impact on me I still remember them, just not as vividly as if something did alter the way I feel. But most of the time I prefer to learn just on the surface because I can't handle having my world rocked every time I learn something new. I think the way I learn is very comparable to how other people learn in and outside of my classroom. The information that I do retain is always very easily relayed to others and I hope that information retained by others can be relayed to me. I don't know if others judge the way I learn the way I do but I think that an experience in the course can especially help learning and keep students retaining information.