Blogging Threefer

April 25th, 2008 asgoodwin

I think that my posts I wrote and half posts I saved during the semester were more insightful into the readings and games. I was closer to them, so I wrote better on them. I wish I had been more diligent about posting in the blog, because I’ve noticed in this and past classes that what I post at the beginning is really interesting, and I don’t necessarily remember it in the detail I wrote.I think that blogging is a good tool in a class like this. I definitely played The Baron more closely than the other classes we played before class but didn’t blog or write an inquiry about because I knew I had to write on it. Particularly in the last unit, more “assigned” blogs (for example, telling us to blog on a game, or on a reading, or just “before class”) would have been a good assignment, because there is a lot to take in and analyze in that section which is controversial in a way that the first parts of the semester weren’t. Sometimes just writing down your reactions is a great help in digging deeper and understanding your reactions to things. I didn’t think to sit and blog after we talked about the Prison game in class, which I had such a gut reaction of dislike against.

I think it also shows me the ideas I kept coming back to over and over again. For me, a lot of what we discussed in the beginning of the semester about games, how they are constructed and how they tell stories, related in my mind to Disneyland. Part of this is because I’m just a Disney nut and it’s on my mind a lot, but also I think it is an interesting parallel to draw. I also liked the Combat in Context essay, because I felt like I understood it in a more real way because I’ve looked at those levels in my past programming assignments.

I’m not sure that my post style has changed over the semester, because so many of my posts came right at the end (as in today). In other classes where I’ve had to blog, I do usually see a more in depth understanding, and I definitely go back and refer to them even now after the semester is over to remind myself of what I’ve learned.

I did notice occasionally in class I would hold back from saying something I’d thought about the readings (usually it was fairly tangential) because I thought I would put it in a blog instead, and I’m not sure that was helpful in the end because the discussion in class would have contributed to the idea more than me rambling in a post. Still, despite that, I think that blogging is a very good tool for keeping track of what I’ve learned during a semester, my thoughts on it, and looking deeper into the readings than I would have otherwise.