I realize that I am reflecting more on ideals and ideas than I am on class proceedings (not that I have not been condensing my thoughts on that - it's just that they are not what I feel would be a publishable format yet).
The nature and efficacy (to the degree that the means meet the ends) of a web-based reflections blog eludes me to some extent because inevitably, there is no absolute honesty in an environment where there is no absolute security or privacy. It could be because that, unlike those days where some language teachers would ask us to pen our most intimate thoughts on anything and everything by journaling, we have really passed the age of innocence, we have passed out of essential schooling with our belief that teachers (tutors of us and student teachers like us) are people whom we can trust with what we really think, regardless of the political correctness or the PR-savvy our comments lack or possess.
I am not advocating a blatant all-out attack on the things we truly rage against, or a shameless confession of who we really are, on a blog. What I am simply saying is that a good class blog is not a good personal journal for it is essentially a task and showcase, not an exhibition of private emotions and that which elicits them.
As a tool of assessment then, are we assessed as a person first , or for our thoughtfulness? Either way irony is evidently built in, for the brash and harsh and impolite, if deemed undesirable learning outcomes for a very task-driven reflection blog (note the oxymoron), will be subsumed under a dogma. Reflections as a tool of participation, yes. Reflections as a tool of assessment, yes, if something other than the amount of thought we put in - not to please others but to express ourselves and our negotiation with self and world - is assessed, then ultimately the reflexivity and personality of the blog is killed.
I am not saying that this class blog has to exhibit the negative traits I am so paranoid and wary of. I merely seek to discern maybe semi-philosophically and whimsically what a class blog is and is expected to be.
Also, how authentic is our web presence as per our blog? Besides the issue discussed earlier, the fact that we can dynamically manage our blog means that authenticity, if present, cannot be built upon our manifest transformation, for memory has become transient in an environment where "all that is solid melts into air." We may not always choose to keep and reveal all our development or atrophy, but our state can be and is perpetually vulnerable to overwrites.
If assignment submissions, once submitted, cannot be re-submitted, and yet blogs and wikis are ongoing exercises in constructing and reconstructing and deconstructing and destroying, do we not have a paradox?
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