Category: Meta

How did knowing you’d have to write a Review on the blog change the way you read our books? How did it change the way you prepared for class?

In terms of reading, the blog definitely helped me to focus on analyzing the books for their views on climate change rather than just reading them for enjoyment. I felt as though many of the books that we read were page-turners, and I enjoyed reading them, but the blog assignment definitely helped to keep me focused on the issues that needed to be discussed.

 

How did writing in this format affect your writing process and writing style? I’m really interested to hear how writing in a blog format was different from writing you’ve done in other classes, whether English classes with more traditional papers, other courses with online writing (blog, discussion board, etc.) or otherwise. Did the possibility of a wider audience – your classmates, or anyone who stumbled upon our blog – change the way you wrote?

This format did not really affect my writing style. While I suppose it should have made my writing more informal and accessible, I still felt more comfortable writing in a style that I would use in a term paper. The possibility of a wider audience caused me to stick more to this, as I wanted my writing to be as good as possible.

 

How often did you read the Reviews posted by your classmates? Did you gravitate towards reading particular writers?

I did not often read the reviews posted by other students, but I did read almost all of the other posts on the blog. I enjoyed looking into and commenting on the articles that my peers brought to the class’s attention. While I’m sure many of the blog posts were interesting, the other content seemed more unique, and usually very easy to comment on.

 

I’d be excited to hear you reflect on whether and/or how your experience with and attitude towards the blog changed over the course of the semester. Did it live up to its promise? Was the blog element of the course better or worse than you hoped or feared?

I thought that the blog would be fun to write, and it was. I enjoyed reading and posting the non-review content a lot more than I thought I would. At the beginning of the class, I was slightly afraid of posting on the blog for everyone to see, but this fear dissipated over the course of the semester.

 

How did knowing you’d have to write a Review on the blog change the way you read our books? How did it change the way you prepared for class?

In some ways, I read books more critically. When I know I’m going to be writing a formal essay, I’m more inclined to take a book for what it is and try to work with its ideas regardless of its flaws. When writing reviews, I felt like I could engage with the ideas of a book while also being free to criticize them when necessary. Likewise, writing reviews made me feel more accountable for knowing the entirety of a book, whereas an academic essay allows me to specialize in one particular focus of a book. To some extent that did happen in this context because of the emphasis on climate change, but otherwise I still felt inclined to read with broader lens.

How did writing in this format affect your writing process and writing style? I’m really interested to hear how writing in a blog format was different from writing you’ve done in other classes, whether English classes with more traditional papers, other courses with online writing (blog, discussion board, etc.) or otherwise. Did the possibility of a wider audience – your classmates, or anyone who stumbled upon our blog – change the way you wrote?

Well first it terrified me… but once I got past that, I was excited to have a platform to share my writing. While there’s something more personal about knowing that only a professor is going to be reading your work, there’s also something great about knowing that your writing on a blog may not stuck in such a vacuum. I felt somewhat more pressured to write with a certain quality, (regardless of whether I always achieved that or not), and as someone who enjoys writing, this was a welcome challenge.

How often did you read the Reviews posted by your classmates? Did you gravitate towards reading particular writers?

I tried to read everyone’s reviews to the best I was able. There may have been some skipped because they were posted really close to class, but even then I often tried to catch up after class. I’ll admit that I sometimes skimmed them if there was a lot or could tell where someone was generally going, but I was nonetheless eager to see what everyone else thought about the class. There were a couple of people whose writing I did especially look forward to each week, but I don’t want to name any names at the expense of dismissing other writers.

Did knowing that you had to post on the blog affect the way you read (and watched) stuff unrelated to the course readings?

I generally do a fair bit of reading outside of class, at least in terms of following the news, but this class made pay a little more attention to climate change related issues.

I’d be excited to hear you reflect on whether and/or how your experience with and attitude towards the blog changed over the course of the semester. Did it live up to its promise? Was the blog element of the course better or worse than you hoped or feared?

I didn’t really have any expectations (good or bad) about the blog at the start of the semester, as I’ve never used this medium within a classroom setting, but overall I think it worked out well. Between Dan Bloom and the Reuters article, I’m kind of surprised by the amount of attention that it has gotten, which was pretty exciting.

Finally, if you’d like, reflect upon the possibility that the work you’ve posted on the blog is now available for anyone to read, even now that the course is over. Do you think this blog could be a useful resource for future readers curious about the topic?

I think this blog is definitely an interesting resource, if for no one else, than for writers who may be considering working with cli-fi or just climate change in general. While we’ve produced discourse in the context of a college classroom, I think we’ve kept a level of accessibility that might be useful for judging how readers in less formal settings engage with cli-fi. I don’t know that my own work will necessarily be of help or interest to anybody, but I’m happy if one person gets anything out of it. Even a negative reaction is worth something.

So I don’t leave on a sour note, I thought I’d post this screenshot of the blog dashboard.

As a class we’ve produced 301 posts (+this one), 116 comments, and 7 pages of content over the semester. I think that’s pretty incredible.

To be completely honest, I’ve never really enjoyed having to write blogs unless it was something I was really interested in.  I think it always becomes more of a “busy work” assignment as opposed to an actual learning experience.  In terms of the books we covered, there were some I found interesting and some I didn’t like at all.  I’m sure this was how it was with everyone.  At times, due to the fact I wasn’t really interested in some of the books, I found myself simply doing the assignment because I had to and not to try and learn anything.  I feel that this affected how I wrote my blog responses.  What I mean by that, is that I simply reviewed the books and readings instead of taking a firm stance on the subjects because I wasn’t as interested in them.

Again, I think I only really paid attention to other blog posts when it was something that appealed to me or awakened my imagination.  However, when I did review blog posts I felt I paid the most attention to the writers from class who were the most thorough in their posts.  This also included individuals who engaged a lot in class and had strong arguments.

All in all, looking back at it, although I don’t personally like blogging, I did learn a decent amount about myself and my own writing style that will help me in the future not only for class but in the real world.  In a way, I was able to open up personally in terms of supporting my beliefs and arguments surrounding the topics I was interested in.  So that was one of the better aspects to blogging for class.

The blog portion of this class was something that made me extremely nervous at the beginning of the semester. I was worried that other people would be reading what I was writing because I wasn’t entirely confident in my writing and I was nervous about doing something wrong (like misunderstanding a character’s motives or the plot). Along with this, everyone in this class really intimidated me because the majority of them are significantly older and therefore smarter than me, making me a little hesitant to post on the blog. Eventually though, I got over myself.

Knowing I’d have to write a review of the books we read in class made me really pay extra attention to everything that was happening in the book, something I don’t typically do when I’m reading just for fun. Not like I don’t pay attention when I’m reading for fun, but I definitely don’t pay as much attention to really specific things like I did with the books we had to read for class. What mostly motivated me to do this was the high expectations that the blog had to meet, seeing as now anyone in the universe who wants to read this blog can do so. I think this is really cool because our blog posts can potentially help other people further develop their own opinions about cli-fi and also help them form a better analysis of whatever book they’re reading the review of.

I tried to read at least two of my classmates’ reviews every week just to make sure I definitely knew what was happening in the book. This was especially helpful for The Collapse of Western Civilization because while that book was one of my favorites (because of how quickly it read) it was extremely confusing, so reading my classmates’ reviews definitely helped with clarification. Overall, I think the blog was a really helpful and successful part of the class that should definitely be continued as long as this class is offered. I think that if the blog didn’t exist, I probably wouldn’t have liked this class as much as I did because while in-class discussions are helpful, the blog posts allowed us to have a more in-depth look of everyone’s opinions of the books.

Personally, I had never taken a literature class before in which our own opinions of the books had mattered so much. Typically, all that matters to the professor is literary analysis and close-reading skills. In the case of the classics, this is totally fine, and the right way to teach a literature class. However, for a literature class about a burgeoning genre such as cli-fi, writing subjective reviews of the weekly novels was the perfect way to test the effectiveness of the genre as a whole. The weekly reviews really allowed me to examine if I found the novels to be effective works of cli-fi or not, which I think is perfect since one of this course’s aims was to examine the effectiveness of the genre as a whole.

Ultimately, the blog did not change my style up too much. I took the reviews quite seriously and treated them as though they would be graded like any other essay I write. Naturally, the style was much more personal and casual. Personally, I got the most enjoyment out of writing the longer expert reviews, as it challenged me to take the two novels I selected very seriously, while also injecting my own (highly positive) opinions into the reviews. Of course, it helps that the two novels I selected for expert review coincidentally happened to be my two favorite novels of the semester (Stewart and Atwood).

Unfortunately, since I had an extremely busy semester, I was not always able to read all of my peers’ reviews. However, when I did read them, I noticed a wide variety of writing styles. Some writers gravitated towards a more academic, serious writing style while others were much more formal. Everyone’s writings were equally interesting to read and there was an interesting blend of styles, in my opinion. My only regret is not having enough time this semester to comment on more people’s blog posts.

Finally, one thing that I really liked about the blog was that whenever I found an interesting article that was pertinent to the class, I was able to share it on the blog. This also forced me to be more engaged in the relevant news pertaining to climate change. So, I for one, found the required 8 blog posts to be a useful addition to make the course as relevant and informative as possibly. Ultimately, I found all aspects of the blog to fit perfectly well for this course, and I do not really have any suggestions for improvement.

Writing blogs for this class is very different from what I am used to doing in my other classes. I had to adjust to a different style of writing when writing these blogs because I am used to writing more formal essays. Although this transition was hard to make at first, I grew to enjoy writing these blogs because they allowed me to think more creatively with the books. It was difficult for me to narrow my thoughts while writing these blogs because we were given very little guidelines in terms of the content of the blogs. Although it was challenging to write these blogs because they were very open ended, this aspect of the blogs allowed me to produce more abstract and interesting work.

I had experience writing online blogs in other classes. However, those blogs were on Black Board through the discussion board tool, which was different from this class because our class had its own website that was available to the public. I preferred writing blogs on our class website rather than on Black Board because the information about the course was easily accessible and it was helpful to read my classmates’ blogs before I posted mine. Reading my classmates’ blogs was helpful because it allowed me to think deeper about the books and develop my own ideas. I also felt that my style of writing was different for these class blogs than other blogs that I have written in the past because I knew that the public was able to read them. For example, I thought more creatively about how I wanted to present my information because I wanted my blog to be interesting to my reader. In contrast, when I posted blogs on Black Board my blogs were less creative because I was simply fulfilling a course requirement.

In terms of my attitude towards the blog as a whole I believe that I became more interested in it as the course progressed. At first the blog made me nervous because I was afraid that my blogs would not relate to the rest of my classmates’ blogs. As I grew more comfortable posting my blogs, I became less intimidated by the blog and more open to sharing my ideas. I liked that our blogs were reviews of the books because they allowed for more opinions and interpretations of the books. Being able to freely express our personal opinions of the books allowed for our class community to become stronger and we had more interesting conversations. I enjoyed reading my classmates’ blogs because there were many times that I never considered something that one of my classmates wrote about, which deepened my thinking about the books.

In the beginning of the semester when I found out a large portion of the class was going to be blogging, part of me wanted to drop the class. Not because I don’t like blogging, I just didn’t think I would be particularly good at it (as reflected in my first blog post grade). Reading other people’s blogs helped me in a lot of ways. I got more in touch with how the writing should be, free but still structured. I learned how to incorporate a lot of big ideas into a reasonable post size so that my classmates and random people reading the blog wouldn’t tune out or start to skim read after the first 4 sentences. I struggled a lot with finding a voice that I felt would adequately show my ideas and stance on certain issues within climate change. My other English classes were very largely paper based, so I actually enjoyed a lot just being able to write what I thought in a way that wasn’t so formal but was still really informing. I had another English class for my internship where we would blog, but that was just saying what we did for the week, so very personal and very easy. This was personal but professional, I feel. I love being able to see what everyone else thinks and how they are fearless in what they write. People that never spoke  in class would have the most incredible ideas and ways of saying them. So in that way I feel what you started here is amazing. Not just for the shy people who don’t talk in class, but for the people who talk too much in class….the ones that everyone pretty much tunes out after a while (sorry), it made it easier to read all of their ideas too. All in all I really enjoyed the blogging aspect of this class, a lot more than I originally thought that I would.

As you’re composing your final “Audit” of the blog element of the course, here are some questions I’m interested in hearing your answers to. No need to answer all of them – and please do take it in whatever direction you’d like – but hopefully these questions will provoke some thoughts:

• How did knowing you’d have to write a Review on the blog change the way you read our books? How did it change the way you prepared for class?
• How did writing in this format affect your writing process and writing style? I’m really interested to hear how writing in a blog format was different from writing you’ve done in other classes, whether English classes with more traditional papers, other courses with online writing (blog, discussion board, etc.) or otherwise. Did the possibility of a wider audience – your classmates, or anyone who stumbled upon our blog – change the way you wrote?
• How often did you read the Reviews posted by your classmates? Did you gravitate towards reading particular writers?
• Did knowing that you had to post on the blog affect the way you read (and watched) stuff unrelated to the course readings?
• I’d be excited to hear you reflect on whether and/or how your experience with and attitude towards the blog changed over the course of the semester. Did it live up to its promise? Was the blog element of the course better or worse than you hoped or feared?
• Finally, if you’d like, reflect upon the possibility that the work you’ve posted on the blog is now available for anyone to read, even now that the course is over. Do you think this blog could be a useful resource for future readers curious about the topic?