Image obtained from google.ca

Do you currently read any blogs? Why or why not?
I follow many blogs that are related to my field such as Codesimplicity, Joelonsoftware, Pythontips, and FluentC++ . These blogs have strong, active, and social online presence in the field. They transfer knowledge, ideas, and experiences aim to help and educate programmers. In addition, they offer tons of engaging and insightful advices on a huge range of development topics as well as the most recent technical updates in the field of programming.

How do you feel about your abilities as a blogger? Do you have any concerns?
I started blogging almost two years ago as part of my PIDP courses followed by my current COI ones. My blogging learning experience is an individualized one, I often describe my blog to be a portfolio space where I can add valuable resources that I found during my courses, document my progress and reflections, and post my opinions and thoughts.
My experience developed overtime, I personally believe that my earlier posts were more likely academic papers presenting search results and facts but were missing my own thoughts and beliefs in regards to the posted topics. Now I am more open to infuse my personality and post my opinions and thoughts more than I were before.
The main key strength of my posts is that though my posts have been quite personal, yet I was keen to provide evident based facts that support my opinions. In addition, in the majority of my posts I was trying to put theory into practice and thus come out with practical strategies or solutions for myself to try and for others to consider.
My main concern is that though my posts might contain important well researched data, yet I believe that I am a conservative writer, my writing style is stiff and perhaps disengaging if to be read by an audience. Further, I am still unable to find posts’ titles that are appealing and catchy to draw people’s attention and curiosity. In addition, I believe my blogging experience was too individual, I never got a comment or feedback on any of my posts. Perhaps I need to share my posts among my peers and thus I can get feedback and comments that can help me to enhance the quality of my posts and the blog design and appearance.

What goal would you like to meet with this blog?
I would like to learn and experiment new technical skills in different areas such as planning the blog content, blog design, managing posts, pages, links, themes, plugins, menus, widgets and more, as well as continue to work hard to enhance my writing skills and style, and hence the quality of my posts. I believe that my blogging learning experience can extend beyond the current academic aspect and can support me professionally as blogs are extraordinary educational tools that can highly improve the learning outcomes (Orlando, 2010, June 7).

I am looking forward to benefit from this learning experience and learn as much as possible out of it in order to develop a group blog for each of the programming courses that I teach. Each blog aims to encourage learners to collaborate and share their thoughts and reflections, and thus builds a stronger learning community where learners are able to actively engage with one another.

Reference:

• Orlando, J. (2010, June 7). Blogging to Improve Student Learning: Tips and Tools for Getting Started. FacultyFocus. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/blogging-to-improve-student-learning-tips-and-tools-for-getting-started/