Blogs in Media Education

I chose to explore Blogs in Media Education mainly because after reading Chris Argyris’s ‘theories of action, double-loop learning and organisational learning’ the encyclopaedia of informal education, I found this article to be more my range of understanding as the technical terms in Chris Argyris’s reading were too complicated and confusing for me to understand.

I was particularly interested in the mention to ‘google’ and how everyone googles everything these days and google is our source to find and discover blogs. An interesting point made was how we as employees google our employers before job interviews but don’t consider the fact that they google us too. They find our Facebooks our personal blogs or tumblr’s, and this, a lot of the time can help convince or deter businesses from employing us.

Another interesting point brought up was how when we created blogs or repost links on public forums or social websites, we rarely think of copyright and who made it. Not sure if I should be ashamed or not as I have a tumblr account which is a popular form of blogging and reposting pictures, videos, audio tracks and gifs which I frequently ‘visit’ to show a  representation of my interests and likes etc. I never think of the source of the image and simply aim to collect work (images mainly) that share similar themes and relationships, or simply because I liked the look of the work.

Interestingly, I like how universities like RMIT university are taking a radical change to their education and using blogs in classes for students which is a modern and easy way for students to post their work without having to print off and hand in their works and opinions which can be very time consuming. I have also found being a first year Media student, when I have group assignments in class, we immediately add each other on facebook and create an event in order to post comments and important notifications in relation to our project.

I don’t know if blogs are just a fad at the moment considering almost everyone has one these days, but can’t imagine what new form of media will overtake blogs. It is becoming easier and easier to create blogs as the templates are already encoded for many and all we have to do is ‘customise’ the page to make it our own. You don’t need to be the smartest cookie to create a blog page anymore which is why more and more people are creating them.