In the first week’s reading, Adrian Miles discusses the crucial importance for media students (and teachers) to use blogs so that they are practicing within the network in order to strengthen their network literacy.

[Blogs are] exemplars of an interlinked, networked, fluid and distinctly contemporary writing practice and communicative space, and it is these qualities that can be leveraged to make them effective learning environments.”

Miles then gives a brief discussion of what a blog is, defining posts, comments, and content management systems (CMS). He explains that blogs are a medium which have “made a strength of the formal qualities of hypertext.” Miles makes clear that digital technologies should be critically examined and explored in relation to other technologies instead of simply replacing them. In the example of integrating blogging into media education, this allows the student to learn the affordances of blogs when comparison to diaries or notebooks and what these ‘traditional’ technologies can (and more often, cannot) do.

I was very intrigued with Miles’ concept of ‘post-print literacy’, and would very much like to explore this further in a blog post.

Learning about and practicing within the network allows us to participate in these changing and entangled spheres as creators with agency, rather than just passive observers and consumers.

Miles launches into a discussion of the communities that blogs enable, through commenting, trackback, and linking. This allows a consideration of where blogs sit in the public/private/semi-private terrains. He makes some valuable points about existing trends in education, such as essay-writing, and why he believes blogging should become past of the assessable curriculum for media students instead (or in supplement). I find myself agreeing with him. However, I need to do a bit more thinking about this first. In fact, next, I’m going to write a post about traditional education, which you can find here (Dear Editing-Emily, please insert link. Best, Writing-Emily).

For example, I am currently writing this blog post during scheduled class time at university. Therefore, I am undertaking a habit-forming activity that is becoming part of my professional practice. Before stopping to think about this, I just thought I was completing a task we were told to do (“write a blog about the readings”). However, with deeper consideration, I now see I am actually being encouraged to integrate the structure and practices of blogging into the scaffold of my life, effectively stepping into the online network. I am creating a “personal learning web documentar[y]” (Miles, 2006). I’m fine-tuning the skills I need to become a self-reflective practitioner, who improves their work by looking both inwardly and outwardly.

An element of blogging I definitely neglect is reading and commenting on my peer’s blogs, so I am making that my goal for this week. I am going to try and keep in mind when doing this that I’m actually completing a much more sophisticated task than remarking on a piece of work someone else has written. I’m being an active participant in the community of blogging, whose actions are really affordances of living in the age of networks.