This year has been a completely different kind of course, for me. Every other year, I've had to sit up until 2 in the morning writing essays and paragraphing and everything else you can think of. But this year was a lot more relaxed and free.
I much prefer blogging to writing essays. My blog is a place where I can go and post all things musical, and it's really useful. I can store things on here that I think would be useful later on. The fact we can also record ourselves playing and upload it for people to see is good too. I've never really thought about uploading a video anywhere, but blogs have changed that. I also found myself falling into a routine, where I would type things and save them as a draft. This is so they were not public, but I could go and read what I was thinking two weeks ago or something. The course has shown me I learn things and organize things in my own way. For example, most people wouldn't prefer to sit and write things that are on their minds down, but I find it easy to do and I potentially have a blog post on me. Having the blog has helped develop that because it's a designated place for me to ramble. Also, learning new techniques on guitar and videoing myself doing them has improved my playing vastly. The fact I can sit there and watch my technique gives me the opportunity to see where I'm slacking and give me areas to tune up. For example, I wrote a post earlier this year about my picking technique. I hadn't even noticed that until it was brought up and I saw myself doing it on a video, and I've now changed it and I've progressed since.
Instead of getting an assignment brief and being told to go and write an essay, we would have a lecture about a certain subject and then write a blog post on it. I found this so much better than writing essays, because I could be informal and just ramble on. I found it good practice to sit with my blog open during the lecture and type notes and later edit them to a post. If it were an essay, I would have to wade though pages upon pages of notes and find what I needed. The blog got rid of that, because it was all there and I just had to expand on ideas I wrote down. As said before, I prefer to write as if I'm talking to someone, so quite informal. With my blog, I see it as I'm talking to the people who read it. An essay just seems like I'm typing to no one, and it gives me no context to write in.
On the other hand, I can see where essays kind of have the upper hand. While blogging may be informal and place to ramble, it can get extremely messy. If I need to find something relevant, I have to find related blog posts and scour through to find what I'm looking for. In an essay, it's all there in one huge chunk of writing. The worst you would have to do it really quick scan it to find what you need. Looking at it from an tutors view, it's the same kind of thing. If you need to mark a student on something, it would be a lot easier to have it all there in front of you than stored in bits around a blog.
For next year, I think I'm going to stick with what I already do, but just do it better. I'll sit in a lecture and write down the key talking points in a draft blog post, write some notes beneath and then shape them into a post that night. Talking about blogging is all well and fine, however getting work in on time for me is something I must focus on. For next year, I'm going to work on this and hopefully improve my organization skills. It would be better I guess to once I've finished a blog post, while I'm still on a roll, I should do any work assigned to me that night too and not leave it or leave it half way finished. I'd like to see the freedom continue next year, because it is a really nice feeling not to have the pressure of outstanding essays over your head. The blog covers essays in short little posts, and it works so well. I would very much like to write an instrumental album too, and record it and release it all myself. It would be an awesome achievement. I'm hoping to record myself a lot more too once I finally have my home PC and studio sorted.
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