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.

Prospectus on Plagiarism

Listing 3 negative aspects:

• the author's standpoint/position on the topic is not clearly outlined
• various different aspects of plagiarism are not clearly defined
• what are possible solutions for instructors to detect and to effectively punish students using plagiarism to get by

If Black English Isn't A Language, What is?

What exactly amounts to language? The author James Baldwin, an African-American writer has a very reasonable stand on what language is all about. Being part of the Civil Rights Movement and having lived in other parts of the world, where languages can have a far more divisive instead of unifying role he gives a very logical argument about language. “Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker” is his key aspect around which he has structured his argument.
His example about France and the French language, spoken in various parts of the globe, logically supports his argument of people being defined by and defining a language. In this example he breaks language down in its many parts, such as control, means of confronting life, political instrument and as a “crucial key to identity”. With that, he points out that language can be a uniting or divorcing force among the people who seem to speak this language. When he says language reveals private identity, I totally have to agree with him, since it feels like I am in the exact situation day-in and day-out. I cannot open my mouth and speak English WITHOUT people recognizing that I am not a native speaker. Like Baldwin puts it, I confess my parents, my youth and my social background right away.
Additionally, he describes Black English as a language separately from White English being developed during the earlier American history of slavery. In his mind Black English is to be seen as a monoculture existing apart from White English which was being out of the WHITE ignorance.
After all, he argues his point very consistently avoiding logical fallacies and providing the reader with lots of descriptive examples to support his claim.

MLA Citation and Evaluation

Romanowski, Michael H. "Common Arguments about the Strengths and Limitations of
Home Schooling." Clearing House 75.2 (Nov. 2001): 79. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 7 Mar. 2008 http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=6514595&site=ehost-live.

Evaluation
I have selected an article issued in the Clearing House Education 75 from November 2001. This article, written by Michael H. Romanowski, Associate Professor of Education at the Ohio Northern University describes very detailed the negative and positive aspects of home schooling “put forth by advocates and critics of home schooling regarding the perceived strengths and limitations of this unique form of education”. (Romanowski 2001)
The author, Michael H. Romanowski, is a very knowledgeable person in the field of education of adolescents and young adults since he has not only taught a variety of different students from different social and ethnic backgrounds but has also published several articles about numerous issues and topics in this field. Although the article I have chosen is from the year of 2001, the content still has a considerable purpose for the topic of my short argument paper about home schooling in the context of higher education. The explicit purpose of this source is to demonstrate the argument of home schooling by itself and to point out possible advantages and challenges home-schooled students may have to face. Personally, Romanowski’s article added information in support of my counterarguments against home schooling as an educational foundation of proficiency in higher education. For instance, he made some very useful claims about the socialization issue of home-schooled students.
Particularly with regard to further research, I should find out more about Michael H. Romanowski and his publications since he has a lot to say about educational matters and movements in our society.

The Right to Fail from William Zinsser

Initially I would like to state that I agree with Zinsser on the fact that the word “drop-out” is only used for people under 21 which I believe is a little discriminating because people beyond this age can fail as well and as bad as we young people can.
A very important question everyone has to ask him or herself at some point in his life is “what is success and what success means individually”. For me, success has a lot to do with happiness, freedom and personal and professional fulfillment. However, there is always the fear of failing. This fear is created by the ONE right our society does not grant us, “the right to fail” without severe social and personal consequences since society solely refers success to material wealth and well-being.
With regards to my personal experiences, I am quite familiar with the fear to fail. A good example happened right after high-school. Since I did not go to college right after high-school as I did not feel emotionally and physically ready, I felt like being a total “let-down” for my parents, having them pointing out, they even do it to this day, that “it would have been better to enter college right away”. When Zinsser says “Who is to say, then, if there is any right path to the top, or even to say what the top consists of?” he points out that there are many possibilities to reach one’s individual goals and everybody should have the right to determine their path in order to achieve them. The socially-accepted path is not necessarily the right one for one person since we are all unique individuals. Additionally, I like the fact that he raises the question about “the top” and what the top should be. For me, the “top” is to graduate from NAU and have a assistant management position at a major business hotel and keep my relationship with my boyfriend of 3 years. My parents, however, have much bigger plans for me. They want me to be the GM of a leading hotel, traveling the world not having any emotional ties to anyone. Consequently, I am constantly trying to do the “right” thing, trying to please them, not to appear as a failure, and simultaneously trying to achieve what I consider the right thing to be. I guess, this illustrates pretty good 2 entirely different definitions of the “top”. I know my parents would never openly classify me as a failure, should I “fail” and not do what’s right in their eyes, but I would intuitively know, that I did something wrong. Another aspect of his essay is that success and failure are very close knit and both lie in the eye of the beholder. I totally agree with him, but I also have to say that it is sometimes quite hard to realize this truth and then, even more difficult, having to face your parents or other people close to you who most of the time totally DISAGREE with your decisions and actions.
The very last statement he makes “Maybe we are learning again to cherish the right of every person to succeed on his own terms and to fail as often as necessary along the way” is very powerful, as he points out that every person should have the freedom and the right to fail as often as necessary on their individual way to success. Personally, I think it can be particularly healthy to fail since you learn to cherish success even more.