The end of the semester is close, summer is around the corner and the question that most of us have been asking ourselves became a reality-in the form of a blog entry, of course-to evaluate the effectiveness of this blog for our management class. Probably most of us embarked on this little project with only one idea of what it meant: a must do exercise worth 20% of our grade. Some others probably saw it as a pain-in-the-you-know-what..."I mean, come on! I work a full time job, I go to school full time, got a husband/fiance/children/dog/cat to take care of, and now you want me to write a blog? Don't you think I have enough with research papers?" , and still for others-those blog lovers-it was an exciting and fun way of working towards their grade. Whichever category you fell in, I can honestly say that at the end, the blog paid off. It not only provided us with a way of connecting with other classmates and getting to know what they thought about certain topics and in which ways we differed, but it also worked as an extra tool to master the management concepts previously learned in class. Because practice makes perfect, it was not enough to go to class, pay attention to the lecture or participate on a class project, take notes or read the book; we needed to come back home, let the new terms sink in our brain, and then put down on writing-blogging- about it. So in this way, if you had ever left class after any activity wondering:"how in the name of God is this related to management?" lol well, by actually doing the blogging and deeply analyzing the various class activities, the connection between the activities and management started to show. The blog also covered some topics that perhaps were not completely covered or not cover at all in class because of lack of time-after all, 22 modules is a lot to teach in a 15-week semester. I have always thought that learning is not a one way street; it involves different methods and some might work better than others depending on the person implementing them. For me, the blogging actually pushed me to go back to my notes and the book and to actually read and understand the material to apply it whenever writing a new post.
However, because nothing is perfect on this world, there is always some room for improvement and this blog is not an exception. Posting about real world issues-for instance, the recent Goldman Sachs scandal, the passed health care reform, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, or the great success of Japanese clothing store Uniqlo (in Soho, anyone?)-and relate them to management would be a good idea for future blogs since it pushes us to read the news, and to be informed about what's going on this world; which whether we like it or not, it is the place where we are living in :D
Although the blog idea was effective in meeting its goals, I think the fact that every student had its own blog and the only way to keep connected to them was making yourself a follower-which I only found out after my third blog entry (sorry guys! I'm not a blog savvy)- left me with the feeling that although the blogs were there, classmates were not REALLY, in a true sense, connected. In other words, I felt like I knew they were there, but there were no "ropes" connecting us to one another; we (our blogs) were floating around this vast parallel universe called Internet. Last semester, I learned a concept in my CIS class: 2-click distance. What it means is that in average, whenever surfing the web, it should take only 2-clicks for a person to get to the website with the information he is looking for. The more clicks it takes for you to get to the desired website, the more distracted you will get which will increase the chances for you to desist on your search. The 2-click average distance is a concept use on the creation of search engines as way to measure their effectiveness. In a way, this is what was happening to me before I got to discover the "become a follower" option; I would get to like one of my classmates' blog, but I would get lost whenever trying to reconnect with it on the next assignment. Two semesters ago,in a Literature course, I got my first-hand experience with blogging: the class was half lecture half online; for the online part, the professor created a blog where she will post every reading we needed to do on class, and for those assigned to be done online, we needed to respond to some questions and post our response as a comment to the reading post on her blog. Then, just like the Management Blog, we will have to comment on three of our classmates' entries. This way, only one stream of entries, comments and responses was created which increased the interaction among classmates since all the blogging was happening within one same blog. This is the link to that course blog if you don't understand what I mean http://gworks-milstein.blogspot.com/ If you click on the link you will see on the left of the screen a list of reading assignments titles and a URL address along with each reading. Further click on one of the URL and it will display the passage of the book we needed to read and the class responses as comments to it.
Finally, although 20% of our total grade was taken away from the exams and weighted on the blog, it is inevitable to not feel anxious before exams. After all, still 70% percent of our grade was based merely on the 3 exams; so since 70 is greater than 20, it does make us think that failling or passing the course depends solely on the exams which is not true. Personally though, I am the kind of student who rather had her grade heavily weighted on the more traditional ways-exams-than in more creative ways. And not because I lack of creativity (my DISC test results gave me a high percentage on creativity) but because, and many of you would agree with me here, my lack of time. Being a full time student with a full time job can really put some limitations on how much time you can dedicate to homework. I'd loved to have put more time to the blog postings because I found it very interesting what my classmates' opinions were, but many times I found myself writting the blogs in the middle of the night, right before the due date. Being a full time student and having a full time job is not fun at all. So for those of you out there, in their early 20's , young-free-spirits who don't have to go to work Monday through Friday from 8 to 5, and then literally run to class, enjoy the free ride while it last! lol :D Being a college-student ONLY is one experience I didn't get to live, but hey! when life gives you lemons, make yourself a lemonade! lol So for future purposes, I would probably change the percentage of the blog assignments, maybe to a 10% or 15%, or give the students the option to decide how much they want their exams/blogs/research papers to weight towards their final grade, of course, within certain ranges. But overall, like I said at the beginning the blog was an activity that excelled its main purpose; would I continue posting after class is over? hmmmm...why don't you find out in a couple of weeks? :D
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