Final Blog

As Unit 1 is coming to an end I can honestly say that it was not as hard as I thought it would be. I thought that it was going to be a little challenging because I am a structured person and was in fact scared to change something that I’ve been doing for so long. During the first unit of this course I have become more comfortable with working with others and trusting in myself.  All through high school all of my English classes required me to write my papers with little or no error at all. When I first started writing my article I found myself going back to that high school way of writing and I actually disposed of that draft and started over with a fresh look. We made our own rubrics to follow in the article project that we are doing in class. This was a helpful tool that showed me that rules change as the genre changes. Recently, we just finished our second peer review session and it was better than the first. During the first peer review session we had, I did my part in giving feedback, however, I did not go in much detail and was a little reluctant to give my opinion on someone else’s work. Also I did exactly what we discussed in class not to do, which was give one word responses and say that I did not see anything wrong. After noticing this I realized that I had to try and improve this so I can get the concept of what this activity is teaching us. During the second peer review session I made a lot of comments on the papers’ of my peers and I also elaborated more when giving the oral feedback. I learned how to give my opinion in a nice way without trying to change my peer’s paper into what I think would make it a good paper. As a part of this unit I had to interview an “expert” for my newspaper, I was not thrilled about this. In my past when I had to interview people for my papers I always chose a friend. For this article I was completely out of my element because I had to research and find someone who would be able to give me detailed and factual information on my topic. In order for me to effectively complete this task I looked at a post my instructor posted on her blog about good interview tips. After reading the tips I came up with a few questions and I read them aloud to my roommate and got her feedback. Overall this class had taught me that feedback is important because you might not see anything wrong with your work simply because you yourself wrote it. Blogging what I learned in class actually helps me retain the information I learned. In conclusion, when I wrote my half-way blog I talked more about the class than myself. My instructor explained that the purpose of the learning blog is to reflect on yourself and see how far you have come. Being able to reflect on myself helps me to look at what I have learned and what I still might have problems with. The first unit was a success and I expect to only improve as the semester goes on.