As my first week of uni has come to an end, there is one word that is been constantly repeated in both my media and cinema studies classes to the point where I can’t think of anything but that single word, and that word, ladies and gentlemen is “blog”.

Blog. Blog. Blog. Blog.
It’s a weird word isn’t it? Keep saying it over and over again and eventually you’ll get to a point where you’ll doubt it’s validity as an English word. Such a short simple, 4-lettered word, and yet, it holds so much value for students undergoing this course. Our blog, is the basis of which our entire university results are based on. So it’s unsurprising how much our lecturers have emphasised the term. So much so, that our first reading was based on the importance of blogging, and why our entire curriculum is centred around blogging.

At first, I was sceptical. For my whole life growing up, I always thought universities assessed their students based on exams and test marks. So when I was told by a student in second-year that “there’s no exams in this course”, I had conflicted feelings. Part of me was screaming “Yes! There’s no exams!”. While the other part of me was quietly wondering “So… what are we graded on in this course?”. Then upon attending my first class, and being told that blogging was the central point of assessment in this course – I became confused. Hearing the word blog – it just reminded me of social media apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. As a person who rarely uses these apps, I was a bit worried. I was told that I had to be active on my blog; with a minimum of four posts a week! I thought to myself, “how the hell am I going to do something so boring for three-years?”

Then I actually tried it.

The first things I did was change my title, choose a new theme and a new profile picture. Then I wrote my first post, and, to my surprise – I actually enjoyed doing it. I started researching ways of making my posts and pages more attractive and interesting. My entire perspective of the concept of blogging changed. At first, I was sceptical and anxious about how blogging was going to work out. And now, here I am happily typing up my fourth post, talking about the one thing that made me a sceptic about this course in the first place. Funny how things change around like that. For me personally, I feel as though the one greatest advantages of blogging is its ability to help students understand the content they are learning. For example, in classes where you just sit quiet and listen, information tends to go through one ear and straight out the other. Even if I write up some notes, it tends to get lost in translation (partly because of my horrendous handwriting). Writing a blog post is like having a discussion. When I write a post, I do several things; I explain what I understand, I state my problems and questions, and I also translate the information given to me by these classes, and write them in my own words. This process has allowed me to understand things to a greater extent then I ever have been able to back in high school. It has made my brain retain information easier, allowed me to understand things – which, I wouldn’t have understood if I just accepted the information as it was given to me, and also, has just simply made it all a lot more interesting.

However, one of the requirements of our weekly blogs is to write an ‘initiative’ post. Which is a post that links back ideas that we learn in our media classes to generally anything relating to media. This was a bit difficult to do however, seeing how all we really discussed was the battle between deep attention and hyper attention, and also the importance of blogging. There was also a lot of introducing between one another, which I won’t get into. In fact, if you haven’t already figured it out, this post right here is my first attempt at writing an ‘initiative’ post. It’s my attempt of linking the the importance of blogging to my own blog and education.

So I’m definitely glad the university made the choice of centring our course around blogging, and I’m excited to see what kind of potential my blog holds for me in the future.