NDSU ENGL 320 BLOG 7

By Thane Kruk

    Over the last several months of the English 320 course at NDSU we have been assigned to create and upload multiple blog postings using various blog sites. These blog assignments have covered a variety of topics, some of which we have gotten to choose as students and others that have been encouraged by the professor. These assignments were typically assigned bi-weekly with other various assignments in between.

    This will be my 7th and final blog post for the course and I couldn't be more thrilled about it. Although I think it has been beneficial to complete these assignment I have viewed it more as busy-work due to the smaller scale of the assignments. I believe the larger scale projects have served a much more beneficial advantage to creating reports that would be used in the work place as compared to these shorter blog assignments or even the persual assignments. 

    However, these smaller assignments have had their own benefits as well. I think one of the primary benefits of these shorter blog assignments has been building skill as well as quality of research when writing about various topics. Being able to effectively and efficiently gather research for these short assignments has introduced me to new or different options for approaching gaining research on these bigger assignments. 

    Although the blog assignments always had at least one suggested topic, we as students were also granted the freedom to choose our own topics. I think this is a very beneficial option to have for this assignment as it allows students to choose a topic that they want or that they are interested in. I believe this makes the students more engaged with the assignment as they are writing about something important or meaningful to themselves. I believe when we as students are interested and engaged in what we are writing translates to overall higher quality of work as well as making the assignment slightly more enjoyable.

    Overall all I think the blog posting assignments were beneficial, I believe the quantity of blog assignments assigned was a bit steep. For example, with this last blog post I am writing, I also have a final paper rough draft due the day after this assignment is due. I believe that this takes away from the students engagement with either the blog assignments or bigger projects when they are due at the same time to try and be more efficient. If we had blog assignments on weeks that we did not have other larger scale assignments, I think it would help the students focus more on the task at hand rather than trying to balance multiple unrelated assignments in the same week. 

    Most students in this class are full time students and have 4 or 5 other classes that they are enrolled in at the same time. This includes multiple assignments going on at the same time as well as studying and reviewing for other classes as well. So to me some of these shorter assignments seem more of a hassle or takeaway from maximizing production and output for those other classes. In my opinion this has made finding the homework, work, and social life balance much harder to fine tune without causing excess stress. Again, I believe the blog assignments did serve a purpose for a number of reasons, but I do not believe that the frequency of these types of assignments were necessary.



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