Remember:

Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of
yourself.
Charlie Chaplin

Assignment Week 4

The Assignment:
  1. An evaluation of your fellow students’ blogs. Explain the components and elements required to develop and design an effective and visually appealing blog. Students will use the feedback they receive from each other to improve their own Blogs.
  2. Cite each of the blog websites that you evaluated in Week Four Discussion One
  3. Explain how you will incorporate this knowledge into your own blog.
            I reviewed Chris’s and Robert’s blogs. No surprise there, since they are the only other people in the class aside from myself. One of the week four discussion posts was very similar to this assignment, and I have already provided feedback to both Chris and Robert on their respective blogs. The following is a summarization of this feedback.
            Her title is unequivocally descriptive. At first glance I thought the title to be a bit too long, but it does narrow her focus to a very specific part of the population while still being attractive to anyone’s compassion. Her profile and the pictures Chris has posted make it easy for the reader to “get to know her” better and lend credibility to her posts. Her postings have been limited, so it is not clear where she will take the blog, but she has made a great start and it makes me want to see more. The fact that she chose the same blog template as I did has, of course, nothing to do with my liking her post a lot, but it does show that she has very good taste! <smile>
            Chris might want to remove any cover pages from her assignments in order to better utilize her space. What looks good in MS Word does not necessarily translate well onto a blog. Also, her side panel could be a bit more developed. A little bit of humor, or something up-to-date might be interesting to the reader.
            In my opinion, Robert is a gifted writer. His writing is eloquent and easy to read. It feels very expansive yet focused at the same time. His Media Technologies assignment not only read well but was visually appealing. He used icons to add interest and color to a rather lengthy piece of writing. As I stated already on his blog, I would have liked to see some more pictures; however, that is my preference and not a negative criticism toward him or his blog. We are now in the fourth week of this course and, unfortunately, I still do not have any real idea who Robert is. There is no profile and, other than the brief introduction paragraph and the Media Technologies assignment, nothing that would give me any hint as to where Robert is planning to take his blog. At this point, I would guess that he created the blog only for this class and he will not continue with it after graduation.  Personally, I find that very unfortunate, because his writing is exquisite.
            Overall, I feel utterly non-qualified to give any type of criticism to anyone’s blog. After all, this is the first time I have ever written one and all I know about a blog is, what I have learned in this class. The articles we read for this class talk about blog layout, use of color, making peace with white space, and that being brief is not a bad thing. None of that makes me an expert. My plan is to continue with my blog as I came to find that writing it turned out to be cathartic for me. My guess is that, as with anything else in life, it is the practice that will make my blog – no, not perfect – but at least interesting enough for my family and friends to spend some time there.



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