Week 8 Progress

Looking Back: I am fairly content with my progress so far. I am nearly a full week ahead, and I was able to accomplish this through extra credit in the first few weeks. I really wish I had more time to work ahead in my schedule, but that has not really happened in the past month. I believe I have done a decent job at setting up my blog and site appropriately, and I do try to change things when I get a useful comment on how to make them better.

Looking Forward: I really do want to get much more ahead for the second half of the semester. I am hoping to get a majority of this class finished over Spring break in a few weeks because I really need that time back as my other classes are becoming much more demanding. I want to avoid spending too much time on each assignment in this class. I try to be thoughtful about each story that I am writing because I know someone will read it, but I need to cut down on how much time I use to write that story or blog post. This will help get my schedule back on track. In regards to my project website, I might add more pictures to help the readers visualize the story more.

I chose this picture to motivate me to keep up with my goals for this class because if I finish this class early that means at least two things. One, I can spend more time with dogs. Two, I can hopefully get more sleep. So a sleeping dog helps sum up both of these reasons quite nicely.

Image Information: Sleeping dog, Wikimedia

Week 8 Comments and Feedback

Feedback In: I would say that the comments and feedback from other students have been nice and friendly so far. The feedback has gotten more specific and useful as the semester has gone on. I think I have noticed that for maybe half of the comments I get, I get feedback on about one thing I could change. I think as more people grow comfortable with giving feedback, this percentage of useful comments will go up. The comments that I find most useful are one that are more specific than vague. So specific suggestions on how I can make something better or easier to use have been quick and easy changes for me. I do also appreciate when positive comments tell me exactly what they did like from what I wrote.

Feedback Out: I would say I am trying to get better at leaving useful comments. I try to tell them what I like and be specific about what they could do to improve. I have found the WWW strategy to really help me with making sure I cover relevant topics in my comments. While reading other people's stories, I have picked up a lot of great ideas on how to approach the assignments in this class and how to make my project better.

Blog Comments: I do feel that by reading people's Introductions, I am getting to know them as a person a little bit more. This does help to flesh out the person behind the words. Having an Introduction post does help you put yourself out there, so then you can see what similar interests you have with other people.

Looking Forward: To make the feedback assignments more useful, I am going to try to do better about being more specific about what to change and provide suggestions on how. I would really benefit if people did the same for me. I would like if people were not as concerned with trying to be super nice to the point where I do not get meaningful feedback. I understand people do not want to offend others, but if there is not honesty in what they do not like, I cannot really improve.

I think this image helps relate what is important about the feedback process. We rarely do anything perfect the first time, so feedback helps us get better with each iteration. As long as we allow ourselves to do things imperfectly, we have so much more time to make what we are doing right by getting input from others.

Image Information: Cat, Cheezburger

Week 8 Reading and Writing

Looking back on my progress this semester, I would say I have made a lot of choices that have slowly made me a better writer and blogger. I reviewed how my blog and website are in terms of functionality, and I added some new widgets and buttons to make navigating to more interesting things easier. I do like the general look of my blog and website, as they are fairly clean and easy to use. Over this semester, after I got over the confusion on how I was supposed to retell a story in my own words, I believe I have done much better since my first story's retelling. Finding the link to the story prompts for retelling the stories in a new way really helped my creativity and imagination. These story prompts really boosted my ideas which lead me away from sticking strictly with the original tale. The reading over this semester has shown how many different ways there are to tell a story. I think I like reading the stories from my fellow classmates the most, as they usually put a creative spin on a story and modernize it, so the story is more relatable.

My favorite picture that I used so far this semester was the one of the galaxy. I chose this picture because the narrator of my project is Tala, the goddess of the stars. This image helped bring into focus what forces of nature we are truly dealing with in our story.

Looking forward, I hope to get even more creative as a writer. Something I may want to get better at writing is to see more examples of how to truly diverge from the original story in favor of a retelling that is only loosely based on what I read. I have had some great examples from reading the stories from other classmates in this course, but I think having more concrete established examples might help me even more. To get more out of the reading, I think it would really be preferable to have less stories to read each week, so then we can dive in more into the few we have. We are assigned to read a lot of stories, and I have not been able to appreciate each one in favor of making sure that I get through reading each one.

Image Information: Galaxy, PxHere