Staring at my reflection

Last year, while I was on my gap year I travelled overseas and was away from home for a lot of the year. I decided that during this time I was going to create a blog which would detail my adventures and in some way, keep in touch with my family and let them see what I was getting up to. At first I updated my blog frequently, writing detailed posts and including lots of pictures.
However, like many people who start blogging, the excitement of my blog died pretty quickly and I soon lost interest in it.
At the beginning of this term when we were told that we were going to design and create our own blogs, I was really excited about it. The fact that I was going to create another blog and have the opportunity to learn how to use and manage it properly was an exciting prospect. I loved the idea that the term would consist of a lot of practical and creative work, as those are two fields of working which I thoroughly enjoy.

In our tutorial, when we formed groups of blogging teams, I instantly knew that my team and I were going to work well together. We were all hard workers who put a lot of effort into producing our best work for the blog. My team and I were all enthusiastic about the blogging assignment for the entire term.
I think the reason why I felt so positive about the productivity which I would produce is because I was working in a group and the maintenance and updating of the blog did not rest entirely on my shoulders. Because of this, I did not feel like I had a huge responsibility to write posts constantly, as my team members would be doing it too. I therefore had the freedom to write when I wanted to and didn’t feel pressured to constantly update it.
Another reason why I felt productive in posting on our blog was because I felt like I was reaching out to other first years and prospective first years on what to expect. I felt as though I could help guide them in the right direction and give them a better sense of what life at Rhodes University and other universities was all about. It felt as though I was achieving something which was quite important.

I found it really easy to generate story ideas according to our blog character. This is probably because the stories related to experiences of first year, which I now have first hand experience in. I wrote about my favourite topics which I often think about, topics which reflected the life of a Rhodes University student in a number of different lights. I tried my best to make my posts inspirational and uplifting, because that is the type of person that I am, and I wanted to show and tell everyone the type of experiences which I as an optimistic, happy person has had being here in university. I wanted to show the good side of being here at Rhodes University, because I know that there are a lot of pessimistic views and articles out there about this university.

All of us who belong to the Gerbil blogging team get along very well and we’re all very close. This made discussions and decisions in our formative meetings very relaxed and easy, because we each gave each other the chance to put our views across before deciding which idea to go with as a group. All our ideas were quite easy to come up with and relate to our blog’s character, because we all had so much which we wanted to talk about our first year here at Rhodes. The assignments which we were given to publish on our blog were also really fun to do, as they focussed on the ideas of what it’s like to be a first year and we were able to express ourselves as creatively as we wanted to.

This course definitely let me grow as a person and gave me the freedom to express myself freely. This allowed me to write about issues which I wanted to write about and I felt no restrictions, because of the fact that it was my own blog. In doing so, I not only reflected about my experiences to other first years, but I was also able to reminisce about my year and everything which happened in my life. It helped me look back and realise how incredibly lucky I am and how wonderful my year has been.

Because we were not working on real publications, the freedom of writing about what we wanted to without having to reference took a while to get used to. However, this type of writing was really fantastic and enjoyable, because the assignments felt more ‘fun’ rather than tedious and just something which we ‘had to do for DP purposes’. I was more inspired to write the assignments which we were given, due to the freedom of our writing.
However, I don’t think our articles can be seen as journalism, but more along the lines of creative writing. Our posts didn’t really hold anything worthy in terms of news values and therefore cannot really be seen as true journalism.

I think that if we had not been restricted to writing along the theme of ‘first year’, our blogs would have been quite messy and would not have been interconnected with one another. I therefore think that it was important to stick to this theme instead about writing about anything and everything that was on our minds.

In terms of my sources, it was easier to write a profile piece on someone in this term than in term one, because I have come out of my shell and I’m not so shy to meet new people. The articles which I wrote seemed to link with a lot of other articles which people around the world wrote. It seemed that many people around the globe also felt that they needed to write about certain issues which I also found important.

Overall, I thought this was a really fantastic course. I had so much fun working with my team members and having the opportunity to write in a free, relaxed manner and about issues which caught my attention. The art of blogging is important in this day and age as it is becoming more and more prominent over the Internet. It is slowly becoming the new form of journalism and learning about blogging has provided us with an important stepping-stone in the form of journalism today and in the future.

xx