I was allowed to do this blog on Confucianism instead of a paper for a Religious Studies class at Marylhurst. I just received the grade today.
Since blogs show the most recent post first, it ends oddly with my reflections on how the assignment went. I thought I had better put in a little explaination of what is going on. A reader may want to start with the oldest post and work their way forward. I imagine that putting together a Blog like this will be a fairly standard assignment some day, right now there is still a preference for academic papers.
It was fun, hard work and, well, I got an A.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Practical Blogging, Or How Well did this Assignment Work
Using the blog format was harder and more time consuming than I had anticipated. I found myself getting stuck on the technical details. The whole idea was to create an electronic version of a notebook. That meant to me that it should look as if I sat down and dashed-off entries casually and personally. The blog should also look good, and link to cool websites.
Well that wasn't exactly the notebook as defined in the assignment. I had glossed over the part of the notebook assignment that included diagrams and charts. This blog contains none of those; perhaps I had confused notebook with diary. Hopefully my lack of diagrams and charts will be made up for by pictures and links. Not every entry contains links, but the ones that are included are fun, interesting additions to the experience. By the time I was reminded of the diagrams and charts part of the notebook assignment, I was committed to doing the blog.
The look took time. Finding pictures and putting them on the blog was new to me. As a consequence I learned all about the new editor at Blogger.com where I housed my blog. I discovered that the new editor was 'new and improved' in so many ways but didn't for some reason have a spell checker like the old editor that I knew well. Others had discovered this and been outraged, I found out when I looked on the user forum. Their rants didn't seem to be producing any change in Blogger management. Periodically I would run into a problem and have to track it down via the forums. To make up for the lack of a spell checker, I started writing it using the Firefox web browser which has its own spell checker, my saved websites for referencing however, were all bookmarked on Internet Explorer. When I wrote the entries I would switch back and forth between Firefox and Explorer. I got into a rhythm bouncing back and forth and, while at first it was annoying, it served as kind of a filing system, making my job easier in the end.
There were funny little problems with connecting the blog posts. Each one is created separately and sometimes I would write something, then think "did I already write that?" and find it difficult to check. I was in the blog editor to do the writing, but to check the other entries meant closing the editor and going and finding a particular post. I found short cuts and ways around these difficulties but it was always a little awkward. The editor is not WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) so once I published an entry, I had to read it in its final version and then go back to the editor to change anything I might see that I didn't like. I did a lot of editing, then checking, then editing then checking.
The learning I took away from this was an appreciation for how different the world of books and the world of the web are. The two mediums are a little awkward around each other. Still, one finds books referenced copiously on Wikipedia. Of the books I used I found Karen Armstrong surprisingly useful, considering she is writing about the Axial Age, and my old Huston Smith. I looked at a lot of bad web-sites on Chinese religion, but many universities have good religion web-sites. The ones I referenced, especially Living in the Chinese Cosmos. gave me information I couldn't find anywhere else. Since I wanted to find those special links, I spent more time searching and discovering on the web then I normally would. For papers I usually spend most of my time with books, not websites.
My habits may change, however, web searching is still an art and takes up oodles of time. The other thing about a site like Living in the Chinese Cosmos is that it is made to be updated. The information that I quoted for this assignment on websites, might not be there tomorrow whereas a published book, referenced to the page will always have that organization. I knew that before, but I find working with something makes me 'realize' more completely what I carry around in my head as information.
Well that wasn't exactly the notebook as defined in the assignment. I had glossed over the part of the notebook assignment that included diagrams and charts. This blog contains none of those; perhaps I had confused notebook with diary. Hopefully my lack of diagrams and charts will be made up for by pictures and links. Not every entry contains links, but the ones that are included are fun, interesting additions to the experience. By the time I was reminded of the diagrams and charts part of the notebook assignment, I was committed to doing the blog.
The look took time. Finding pictures and putting them on the blog was new to me. As a consequence I learned all about the new editor at Blogger.com where I housed my blog. I discovered that the new editor was 'new and improved' in so many ways but didn't for some reason have a spell checker like the old editor that I knew well. Others had discovered this and been outraged, I found out when I looked on the user forum. Their rants didn't seem to be producing any change in Blogger management. Periodically I would run into a problem and have to track it down via the forums. To make up for the lack of a spell checker, I started writing it using the Firefox web browser which has its own spell checker, my saved websites for referencing however, were all bookmarked on Internet Explorer. When I wrote the entries I would switch back and forth between Firefox and Explorer. I got into a rhythm bouncing back and forth and, while at first it was annoying, it served as kind of a filing system, making my job easier in the end.
There were funny little problems with connecting the blog posts. Each one is created separately and sometimes I would write something, then think "did I already write that?" and find it difficult to check. I was in the blog editor to do the writing, but to check the other entries meant closing the editor and going and finding a particular post. I found short cuts and ways around these difficulties but it was always a little awkward. The editor is not WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) so once I published an entry, I had to read it in its final version and then go back to the editor to change anything I might see that I didn't like. I did a lot of editing, then checking, then editing then checking.
The learning I took away from this was an appreciation for how different the world of books and the world of the web are. The two mediums are a little awkward around each other. Still, one finds books referenced copiously on Wikipedia. Of the books I used I found Karen Armstrong surprisingly useful, considering she is writing about the Axial Age, and my old Huston Smith. I looked at a lot of bad web-sites on Chinese religion, but many universities have good religion web-sites. The ones I referenced, especially Living in the Chinese Cosmos. gave me information I couldn't find anywhere else. Since I wanted to find those special links, I spent more time searching and discovering on the web then I normally would. For papers I usually spend most of my time with books, not websites.
My habits may change, however, web searching is still an art and takes up oodles of time. The other thing about a site like Living in the Chinese Cosmos is that it is made to be updated. The information that I quoted for this assignment on websites, might not be there tomorrow whereas a published book, referenced to the page will always have that organization. I knew that before, but I find working with something makes me 'realize' more completely what I carry around in my head as information.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
