Open Writing

I feel that, depending on what kind of works you are publishing, there can be an equal amount of advantages and disadvantages. The benefits of writing on the open and accessible internet can be many different things. I think the biggest benefit of having works on the internet is receiving feedback. Why else would someone publish anything online? The only reason would be so that others could read it and so that the author could get a response. For the purposes of us writing our blogs online for class, it is a benefit for the students because we can see each other’s work and observe the way our class mates write and pick up good ways of writing or good ideas from them; however, I do not mean plagiarize. Also, as a benefit to me personally, I tend to write better if I know there are others out there viewing my writings. I feel more pressured not to just bull shit my way through my papers or blogs. To me, it would be embarrassing if I knew I did not try on something and knew it was bad but other people were reading it. I would rather give the extra effort and not look like an idiot to my whole class. Posting our blogs online also gives the professor an easy way to view our work and what we think of each other’s writings. I think that as a class we are exploiting the benefits that I stated about posting our writings online. I think that it forces us all to write better because it is being viewed by our class and anyone else who wants to see it.


Although posting out writings online as blogs is beneficial in certain ways, it can also bring about unwanted issues. The biggest issue with posting your own thoughts is that, other than those people in our class, we do not know who exactly is reading what we post. There are some really creepy people out there and it always worries me that someone could be going through all my thoughts online. In contrast, I am sure that almost everyone in our class has something like a Facebook or MySpace so we are all used to having people look at what we are thinking. Another problem with using the internet for our school work is the technical issues that have been coming up. A person never knows when the system will go down or the internet in the dorms will go down. Recently, at University Towers, the internet went down for a long time and caused a lot of the residents issues because of school work that had to be turned in. Although the library is always an option to go to for internet issues, the issues on Moodle going down or something similar to that, like blogger going down as well, could not be helped by the time we need our work in. No one wants to be counted off points for simple technical difficulties.

All of these challenges can be addressed in simple ways because if the fault is technical, you can always talk to the professor, and as for the issue of creepy people, we could try to make our blogs private in some way if it ever became a big issue, which I do not think that it will.