You guys need to blog! Blog blog blog. Blog blog blog blog blog blog blog. Blog!

Uhm. What.

This was what I was told during my Engineering & Technology Forum... class... thing. This class works in an unusual way. It has us (the students) listen to lectures by prominent speakers, and then also participate in smaller class discussions. Our grade, though, is based on attendance to the big lectures in the lecture hall and on the existence and insightfulness of "blog posts" that we post on the class "blog" on its Blackboard Site.

However, "blog" seems to be the new word for "forum". Basically, what the blog is is a grand glorified forum, on which everyone startes a new thread containing their insights or ideas, and others can comment on it. That's all fine and good --- sharing ideas is the key to getting more ideas and enlightening each other. So then why am I complaining?

I will not!

Well, for a couple reasons. The first (and my usual readers must excuse me for repeating this) is that the world at large needs to get what the heck a blog is. Sure, it's an "online journal", but it is not a diary. You don't talk about spontaneous things in your life. A blog is supposed to have a few authors talking about similar things and tracking their progress through time. For example, in my blog, I (the only author) talk about the intorwabs, cool tech stuff, and (as of late) college and its "wtf"s. It would be a more interesting blog if I had multiple authors, perhaps from different lives (different colleges?) and got contrasting views, but eh.

But if there's a blog with tens of authors, what coherency is there? Especially if everyone is just repeating the same clichéd ideas.

Of course, someone smart would say: "Okay, I'll call it a forum, but it's supposed to be about insights of the students, how come they're all saying the same thing and being boring?"

Because...

List of people who care. source

Why?

Well, the reason (in my opinion) falls somewhere along the line of "you need to do 3 posts per week to get your grade!" This leads to people only doing posts for the sake of the grade. When this is applied to math problems ("do so many a week to pass") it works, because those have right and wrong answers. No matter how shoddily or without care they're solved, if they're right you get points, if they're wrong you don't.

But for "blog" (forum) entries, it's not clear-cut. The professor and TAs are looking for insightful comments on material. My impression is that they're trying to achieve this by asking for sheer large volume of posts, just as a miner would mine an entire mountain looking for a diamond. The thing is, for the students to always (or at least, more often) have insightful thoughts, those thoughts need to be triggered, especially if the subject is not their favorite. The students need to walk out of the class with a sense of "Dang! That was interesting! I wonder..."

And, while paying attention and turning gears is the student's job, a good presentation always helps. For example, the presentation about the Apollo project, while it had some interesting tidbits of information, wasn't especially thought-enticing so much as plain informational. The presentation from the small-class professor I had today was more "arousing" than the other one because, while it didn't go into information overload mode, it presented some interesting ideas about how innovation changes our world. Flying people? An event-archiving and scheduling business based off Facebook events? Instant property value calculation? Cool!

I don't need a counter for how many posts I've made to talk about those. Nor will I postpone till 23:59 the night before to submit my entries because I can't think of anything. Or, maybe just...

Source

Note: So I guess this is my first post for the week, since I submitted it both there and on my real blog here at opensourcenerd.com?