Reflective Statement on Blog

In this quarter, blogs continue providing the class a convenient digital space to communicate and response towards each other’s comment on the course readings and new concepts about multimodal and multimedia writing. It is also helpful in a sense that all peer responses are kept in this space which I can always go back and review some of the important questions that viewers put up. In this sense, blogs offer me more tracks of thoughts to pursue in addition to notes taken during the seminar. Aside from posts and comments, we also have a nice collection of handouts and copies of PowerPoints for the articles that we choose to read this time on the main course blog. Together with the blog posts, they provide an efficient channel for a review of the scholarly writings covered by the seminar. As usual, blogging brings qualities of a multimedia English classroom that is liberal, communicable, and meanwhile, critical into a concrete embodiment.

I noticed that some classmates are more active in composing with multimedia components this time, given the experiences from the seminar of Eco-English. Pictures play a more active role in a number of blogs such as Lana’s posts, and hence, more vitality of writing seems to be injected during the process. We get to arrange the layout of our writing in various ways, embeding assisting tools to better illustrate our ideas or creating more layers of meaning with symbols or images. No matter it is viewing other’s multimodal writing or composing by myself, such experience helps me to grow a more tangible idea of visual rhetoric in terms of the arrangement and coordination of images with texts. Although I did not manage to decorate my writing as much as I want, I enjoy reading peers’ posts that provide really good examples of digital writing and visual arrangement. As pointed out by many scholars in multimedia composition (Selfe, Lunsford, etc.), too often writing classes places emphasis on alphabetic composing and ignores audio and visual literacy that is already taken as a daily component by the young generation. Blogs is a good place to start engagement with “the new literacy,” and from this perspective, it endows better convergence of literacy praxis for writing courses.

However, the opportunity of composing with websites also allows me to gain more reflection over the affordance of blogs. Although I just start to establish a website in a very superficial way with Weebly, it is unexpected that blogs allow all kinds of multimedia components while the running of websites contains more restrictions, such as the cost for unloading videos or privacy settings. Furthermore, blog allows composed responses in individual entries while websites demands a structural work with arranged categories. In consideration of audience, blogs tend to be implemented more by viewers who keep continuing tracks and responses while websites serves more as a data base to visitors. On the positive side, websites may be easier to navigate given the categories and hierarchies of the system while it would be of more trouble for blog viewers if they want to locate certain entries with specific subjects. Yet, this in turn shows that blog is a competitive online space for exchange of ideas.