So now a couple of people have posted on the nature of the class this semester, but here’s my two cents:

This semester has been anxiety-ridden in terms of academic performance for me. And I blame most of that on the endless information I get from the blog and the wiki. Two of my classes have blogs, which means that no matter where I go, I can’t leave class. There’s always a discussion going on that requires a response or extra reading to do so you don’t repeat a point made on the blog in class or just an interesting link. That’s my first complaint (or maybe just an example of my laziness).

I think Oz kind of touched on this topic earlier, but there are some things I've been thinking about lately in terms of the nature of this class. On this blog we use anonymous names, but of course we all know/could figure out who's who. We saw presentations of people's final projects and can also clink on links to see all of their content whenever we like. We can look at who's updating the wiki and who made what editorial changes. There's something about the way this class is set up that lets people get to know more about each other, and to make judgments, whether correct or not. Most classes you just sort of drift through without really getting a sense of who other people are or what they're interested in, but not this class--I feel like I've seen certain parts of people's personalities coming through their academic work. And what's interesting to me is that this new level of interaction (or at least it's new for me) is facilitated by the internet and the online communities we've created.

It seems to me that the discourse of the blog and the discourse of our actual class meetings are on kind of parallel and seldom interactive tracks. Every now and then in class somebody will reference a post from the blogging that has been done in the intervening time between class meetings, and we may occasionally expand on what general topics are currently in vogue "on the blog." However, I feel that overall the blog and the class are existing as separate, sometimes adversarial spheres.

How are they adversarial? I don't know if anybody else is experiencing this, but I have been finding it somewhat difficult to balance the need to participate to the required degree in both.