While I cannot admit I personally admit looking forward to my week creating a well-informed post, I do truly admit that I enjoy discovering just how informed my fellow classmates are becoming on their respective issues – and also how interesting they make it to share their new-found knowledge! They do require more preparation and research seeing as the best CI posts include different forms of media as well as links to different sources, but this extra work makes for a more engaging blog-reading experience. Additionally, these Civic Issues posts and subsequent comments feel more like a conversation than any other sub-blog we’ve had, and that is definitely the most interesting part. I actually look forward to being informed. And not just on some fun Passion topic. These are real issues, and not only should we be informed, but we should have a medium to create conversation – deliberation is already happening!
What I particularly enjoyed about others’ blog posts that I hope to include more in my future ones is a specific tie-in from our lives (the lives of Freshman Penn State students) to the issue at hand. Sometimes you read blogs that are informative, but that you ultimately leave thinking – Well, so what? This noted connection and relativity to students’ lives is essential, and the less-expected the connection is, the better. Finally, in terms of what I plan my next CI posts to look like – an interesting thing happened with my first one. While my CI blog post is about education, my first blog post addressed gender issues in education. This, funnily enough, seemed to have confused people into thinking that my CI blog is on gender issues! But it did spark an idea – an idea I’m planning on playing around with. What if I connect Education to any of the other Civic Issue topics, addressing a different one each time? Like I said, I’d have to play around with this, but I’d be interested to see how many more people I could confuse.
I totally agree with you that it’s amazing how well-informed and thoughtful you and your classmates are about the issues you’ve chosen. Like you, I’m learning so much about these topics through the CI blogs. And I enjoy reading the comments too–they feel like real conversations!
I agree with you – while I do enjoy reading passion blogs the most (obviously), these CI posts are a close runner up. It’s not like they’re a snooze fest to read. They’re actually really interesting and I’m learning a lot that I did not know before!
I think your idea to tie education in with another civic issue is a really creative one. Do you have any specific ideas yet? It definitely helps to somehow incorporate how it relates to us as Penn State students (good point, there).
That would be a great idea! It would be very unique to connect CI topics within posts, and I think you could go very far with that. I also wanted to note that I was really impressed by your post this week. You definitely did what you said: made connections and rlated to people! In fact this time, you mentioned your commenters directly and linked to your previous post. Very impressive. Keep it up!