Final BlogPost: What is a Blog and How did my Perceptions of a Blog change over the semester??

What is a Blog and How did my Perception of a Blog change over the Semester??

Now after one semester of intensive blogging in the context of our English class, I have to say my experience about blogs is less limited and I actually feel I have widened my horizon with respect to the virtual world.

My opinion on blogging and the reasons why people blog, however, have not considerably changed. I still consider a blog a communication platform, either with a personal or private agenda or with a more specific agenda, such as the political blogs you find everywhere on the net. On these blogs people share and discuss matters of relevance, express emotions and opinions as well as they are a method of self-display. There are also various ways of self-display – you can upload pictures and songs, and sometimes these sites even let you create slideshows and video clips. Apart from the more trivial blogs I have mentioned prior to my advanced knowledge of blogging, such as myspace.com and facebook.com, I have found more sophisticated blogging forums. While I was doing research for my argument paper, for instance, I came across numerous blogs where homeschooling families shared their thoughts, ideas and concerns with other homeschooling parents. I thought that was pretty interesting. Although these blogs provided me with valuable insight, their information was not very valuable to me and my paper but it helped me to approach the issue from different angles.

Additionally, I still believe a blog can even be a great tool to stay in touch with friends and family, granted they are knowledgeable to use a blog. I really liked what one of my friends did. She created a travel blog, which she is using to continuously update her friends and family about her latest travel adventures, the various trips she is taking and the internships she took abroad. Since I liked her idea so much, I am really thinking about creating a blog for myself where I put information about me and what I am doing while I am over here in order to keep them posted and to stay in touch with my friends and family. Therefore, this blog could be beneficial for both, me and my folks.

One major issue about blogging, I believe is critically important and should not be overseen – the problem of hate-speech and hate-crime. Since anyone can publish and express anything online, people subscribing to certain blogs MUST be very careful about their choice of blog. Hate-speech and discriminatory language is a very wide spread issue among blogging and bloggers themselves and needs to be carefully monitored since hate-speech can manipulate certain people and can motivate all sorts of criminal acts and felonies.

Summarizing my thoughts on web blogs, I can honestly say that I know a lot more about them and that this class made me more aware of them. Our class blog, although sometimes I really did NOT feel like blogging was quite beneficial to the communication in and for the class but it will never and should never replace the real exchange of thoughts and information, i.e. the actual communication.

Discrimination and the Democratic presidential nomination race

The essay “Discrimination is a Virtue“by Robert K. Miller deals with the very sensitive subject of discrimination. Generally, the term discrimination is used in a negative way – namely to point out racial or social discrepancies among people. However, when looking up the term in a dictionary or thesaurus, the actual meaning of discrimination has a positive connotation, for instance meaning to differentiate, to compare or to distinguish. Over the years, unfortunately, the word has been constantly misused and thus, everybody associates something negative with it.
The Democratic presidential nomination race has sound the death knell for the word discrimination. Both candidates, Clinton and Obama, have very unique personalities and promote slightly different concepts; however, they both represent one party. Through this unique combination of 2 Democratic presidential hopefuls, a “white female” and a “black male”, the word discrimination has become more fashionable than ever. Additionally, I believe, the media providers, such as CNN or CBS News fuels these flames, thus contributing largely to this unnecessary discussion of voting for a black male or a white female. People’s sensitivity to this word has been over-exhausted and when they talk about who to vote for, it seems that skin color and sex are the key criteria for their decisions. Especially in this presidential nomination race, racial and gender differences have been over-emphasized and it is really disturbing for me that no one seems to care about the political content and agendas they stand for!!!

Visual Blogpost and Interpretation

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/Homeschool/table4.asp

To further illustrate the positive aspects of homeschooling the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has created a matrix in order to graphically analyze the preferences for homeschooling. This matrix is retrieved from a publication of education matters for the years of 1999 to 2003 indicating the reasons for homeschooling, the respective number, in thousands, of home schooled students and the equivalent percentage. One can identify from the matrix that the main reason for homeschooling is the notion of parents being more capable of providing their offspring with a better education compared to public schools. Astonishingly enough, the development of a child’s character and morality ranks number five among possible reasons for homeschooling, although it is seemingly considered as the most important criteria for homeschooling.