Discussion Forum Blog Post

The discussion forum for Communicating with Public Audiences was engaging and useful for me. I got to write a short and descriptive response about what we read about communicating with public audiences and receive feedback from my classmates. I also got to give feedback to my classmates about what I thought about their responses. Even though the article we read did not directly relate to us because we are not science writers, it helped us to understand what it takes to reach a public audience. In our life time, at some point, we will most likely be faced with a situation where we must speak or write to a public or popular audience. We could look back at this article and the examples in it and put it all together to make one amazing speech or article. The discussion forum was very confusing at first but once we got the hang of it, it was not so bad. I think the discussion forums are a good thing but only if the articles relate directly to us and could help us in any way for writing. If we are given an article that does not relate to us or we are not interested in it then we will do very poorly on the discussion forum and it would ultimately be a waste of our time as well as the instructor since the instructor would have to read all of the discussions. I liked it but in ways it seemed kind of pointless. I learned from reading the article but would have rather done a blog about it considering it is practically the same thing as a discussion forum. We posted what we thought, answered questions, and commented just as we would in a blog. Blogs are just less confusing and time consuming since we already know how to do them and have experience using them. For the discussion forum to be improved I say that it should just be moved to a blog post completely. Forums are great for moodle for questions and things of that sort but it just made it one complicated mess for the students to try to figure out what we were supposed to do. Since all instructions were online, they helped somewhat but not as much as one would have liked. The article itself was very helpful if I would ever have to write or speak for a public or popular audience but I personally like when we have questions to answer in a blog post. The questions we are asked to answer in each blog post let me reflect and learn even more about what I have read and it settles deeper in my mind so I retain the information and can use it for future reference. Blog posts are also easier to access and find to go back and look at the information incase I do actually one day have to write or speak for a popular audience. It is a public accessible internet website, and much more accessible than a course website which I must be enrolled in to view. So, after I finish my English 101 course I could no longer go back and look at forum discussions that I did during my time in that class. Using this information in a blog post seems like an all around better idea.