Reflection on Four ENGL 866 Blog Posts

This week, I reviewed and replied to the following four blog posts.

Diane Cook - Reflection, reflections, reflections, never-ending-reflections…

I really enjoyed Diane's post because it was really a one-stop-shop of the reflections from this week.  I was also drawn to it because she reviewed two of my posts (one from my blog, plus the canonical wiki page) and provide some great feedback and insights.  I was also relieved to see that someone else was stressing a bit about work load and lack of hours in the day.  I'm not complaining, but I have to admit I have my hands in a lot of pots right now so time management has been a bit of a challenge for me lately. Finally, I enjoyed reading about Diane's adventures in learning JavaScript.  I can relate to the feeling that the tutorials I'm choosing aren't fitting my needs.  I haven't checked out any of the tutorials on Lynda or Educator.com, so I think I may do some poking around on those sites for my next set of tutorials.

2) Jennifer Buckner - Rhetorical Analysis, VW Beetle Site in HTML5

Jennifer wrote a really fun blog post about the new VW Beetle Site, which uses HTML5.  The site is really cool, and I would encourage anyone to check it out.  I liked Jennifer's post because it was informative and clear.  It was helpful to see how she conducted her rhetorical analysis.  The only thing I might do slightly differently would be to try and connect some of the concepts I have learned in tutorials with features I see in my text. Then again, maybe that's not appropriate for a rhetorical analysis...

3) Amanda Lynn David - InDesign Tutorial Part I

I was drawn to Amanda's post because she is working with an application I have never heard of before - InDesign.  Since it was completely new to me, I went ahead and watched the first intro tutorial that Amanda posted, and I realized the InDesign is like Microsoft Publisher on steroids. :)  Since I knew nothing about her application, I ended up responding to her posts with more questions than comments.  I look forward to seeing what she does with the software for her final project.

4) Eric Sentell - Reflection on the Peer Review Process

The last post I reviewed was written by Eric, and it was a reflection on the feedback he received on his Canonical Text Wiki Page.  I felt bad for Eric because he received some comments he did not expect/understand, and I hadn't reviewed the wiki by the time he had written the post, so he didn't have much to go on.  Anyway, the main thing I learned from his post was that we really do rely on each other for timely, thoughtful, detailed and accurate feedback, and when we don't get the kind of feedback we are looking for, it can be very frustrating. Totally understandable!