The Freedom & Potential of Blogging

After reading through The Three Phases of Academic Blogging, I feel both humbled and inspired in the potential of my personal blogging endeavors.  While the great fear is being stuck in phase one of blogging-merely "exploring", that exploration is a necessary step.  I've never blogged prior to this class.  I guess the closest experience I could claim would be when I wrote letters home from my mission, knowing they would be distributed to some close friends and family.  While they have been foreign and sometimes difficult waters to tread, this stage of exploration in blogging has allowed me to write in a personal way, and for credit nonetheless!

I was inspired as I read Dr. Burton's explanation of the Power of the Personal.  Two of my roommates are English majors, and we often discuss how in many of our literature courses we feel we have the exact same discussions over the exact same themes and write practically the exact same research papers.  The passion and creativity that was maybe there for my first discussion of women's rights in a novel was completely gone after a dozen similar discussions, arguing the same things.  Due to the constantly morphing nature of the digital age, blogging allows for me as a student to address common topics in a unique and exciting way.  Through the personal touch of blogging, the conversation never ends, so instead of repeating itself over and over and over, it naturally evolves.  In his conclusion, Dr. Burton states, "I will go so far as to say that teachers of writing who persist in training students to write in ways that ignore this context are endangering the literacy of their students. Rather than preparing them to communicate well within society, they actually prevent them from doing so at a time when it is both practical and profitable to interact with others."  This interaction goes beyond giving a shout-out in class to the comment that was given prior to your own, it allows us to truly help each other grow and develop, both ideas and our personal selves, which is and should be the ultimate goal of learning in any field!