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.

stereotypical news article blog post

Just by looking at how the news article is laid out with all of the short paragraphs, it looks exactly like the popular article I used for my paper. The entire article consisted of tiny paragraphs of a sentence or two and this is actually addressed in the news article in the second short paragraph. Everything that is being addressed within this news article that is making fun of a general news article I saw within my popular article that I used for my second major paper. I did not realize that all articles written for a general or popular audience are all written the same. There is obviously a stereotype for all popular articles written for a popular audience and I feel like it degrades popular audiences, they make it seem like popular audiences are too stupid or incompetent to understand anything that isn't sugar coated and wrote out very precisely. While reading this article I have noticed many of the things that we have talked about in class. In one paragraph it says that it will provide the name of the journal that the research was published in but it won't bother to cite it because they don't want to bother with it, they don't want to link to the article, and that the copy right has expired by this time and there is no use. We learned that any information that is not yours must be cited so this baffles me to be truthful. Yet, in the next paragraph the author will provide a quote by someone from a university and the author will give them credit, there in citing that source. This is not very consistent and confuses me. Something else I noticed that I remember from the article I used for my paper is that they will use a bold subtitle to start another section about more research and other information, this happened three or four times in the article I used. This entire article is shocking to me, I never knew things like this existed.

scholarly blog article

About: My articles are about the impact that oil spills have. This includes impacts on the environment, animals, people, and money.

Overview of scholarly article:
In my scholarly article, the topic discussed is the impact that oil spills have on the earth and the environment. Some of the main points in the article include impacts on aquatic environments. The article points out that no oil spill is harmless and there are acute impacts like reduced reproduction, altered development, decreased defense from disease and impaired feeding mechanisms. The article states that there are often long-term chronic exposures due to continuous oil spills that serious effects on the species and the ecosystem. There are also different kinds of impacts like the economic costs of oil spills. The clean up costs of an oil spill can be small or very very great, depending on the size, location, type of oil, and how much oil is spilled. Not only are species hurt or killed by oil spills btu natural resources are damaged due to oil spills. When natural resources are damaged or ruined there are many costs like restoring the resources or replacing ruined resources. Wildlife is especially highlighted in the article as being impacted by an oil spill.

I am more nervous about this paper than I was about the first paper we wrote for English 101. I am nervous because I do not know much about the subject of which I am writing about and it is hard for me to grasp the idea of something that I have not been educated about. The research to find the two articles was not very hard and I am very pleased with the articles I found. Researching how the articles address different audiences and how they cater to their different audiences is going to be much more of a struggle I know. I am confident in the peer reviews however because I know that my classmates will give me positive feedback to push my paper in the direction of which it needs to go. The peer reviews were very helpful in the first paper and I hope that the reviews give me the confidence I need to do a great job on this paper. I plan on  dissecting each part of each article and asking myself "how does this apply to the intended audience?" then I can elaborate on each part of the article. I am worried that I will run out of things to say or become too redundant trying to reach the six page requirement. I was too redundant in my last paper and I do not want to do that again. Through writing this paper I am excited to learn more about the topic at hand and start to realize how each kind of audience should be addressed.

Scholarly Article: (2010). Impact of Oil Spills. Congressional Digest, 89 (6), 167-192.

http://web.ebscohost.com.www.lib.ncsu.edu:2048/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=14&hid=109&sid=ab7ee169-0493-4762-a914-081e145e4f3b%40sessionmgr111

Popular Article: Gillis, J. & Kaufman L. (2010). After Oil Spills, Hidden Damages Can Last for Years. The New York Times, A1.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/science/earth/18enviro.html?_r=1