SWOT

Blogging in the English 191 Class:

Strengths: Blogging allows students to voice their opinion while having the ability to remain anonymous, (well, until we gave out the class list anyway). It also allows us to save paper, considering we don't have to print out any of the blogs that we write, which can get expensive and wasteful, especially if we had to make extra copys of all of our blogs for our classmates to comment on. On the subject of comments, online blogging also allow us to continue the comments as conversations if we should choose to do that.

Weaknesses: The only big weakness I can see is the danger of puting any personal information in the blog. We did make it so that only our class has the list of these students and made it so that our blogs are not on the list that is shown to the public, however people can still stumble upon things like these, so it is very important to not give any personal information. There is a smaller weakness that I have with blogging, and that is that since the deadline is always Friday night at midnight, I have a tendancy to forget to do my blogging. After I'm done with my classes on Friday I feel like "it's the weekend now, so I can relax," so I forget about blogging. Though that's just my tendancy to not do any homework on Friday nights. I usually do it Saturday or Sunday nights, so this probably isn't a problem for everyone.

Opportunities: The opportunities of blogging in class are pretty much the same as the strengths. We are able to say what we think without worrying about people's reaction towards us personally about it, and we can continue conversations with other bloggers on the topic of choice.

Threats: Once again, it's the same as the weaknesses. There's just the treat of people outside our class coming across the blog pages, which can be dangerous if there is any personal information on the blogs.

I like blogs! Awesome for classroom use! Keep it going!

My view of blogging and myspace

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7668788/

I have a love hate relationship with myspace. I'm addicted to it. I like doing surveys, and seeing my friends newest pics, but obviously there is danger to that. I found this article about myspace and other blogging sites on the web and it says that about half of the blogs out there are done by teenagers. I think blogging is a great thing, but only if the author knows what information they should and shouldn't give about themselves. Names, addresses, schools... all this information really shouldn't be posted where anyone can see it. Like for me, if I'm writing to a friend that I know in person I'll use my actual name, but otherwise if I'm posting something I'll use my stage name KillerMay. Or if I'm filling out a survey and it askes where you live or something like that, I either won't put anything, or I'll put "cloud town."

However, many of the people who are posting blogs don't realize the dangers of posting information about yourself, mainly because most of them are teenagers, many under 15 years old. Pretty much all parents give the lecture to their kids to not talk to strangers, but most kids only relate that to real life. They figure that there's no harm in talking to someone on the internet because they can't actually hurt them, but if they talk to this person, giving them more and more information little bits at a time, that person can easily find them. There are some sick people out there, and they'll take full advantage of the information they're given. Parents should be sure it's clear to their kids that the "don't talk to strangers," talk doesn't only apply to people they meet in real life, it also applys to those they meet on the internet.