Blog Post of the Week #3

Blog Posts of the Week

Blog Posts of the Week are a showcase of student-curated blog posts, highlighting exemplary blog posts that demonstrate innovative uses of key rhetorical elements of class blog posts. Students vote each week for the top two blog posts (and justify their decision) using the polls I post here. Winners earn bragging rights and other perks to be decided upon by us at the beginning of the semester.

Blog Post of the Week #3

1/31/2015

Remember to VOTE & COMMENT. Your comments should include PRAISES & PROBLEMS. Your PRAISES should include a brief, reflective explanation for your vote and, if you want, a comment or two about what other students' sites did well that deserves recognition; feel free to name names here. Your PROBLEMS portion of your comment should include THREE ISSUES you see repeated throughout the blog posts that we all need to consider, address, and improve on (don't name names in this part, though).

THANKS!

25 Comments

Xinxiu Tian link

2/1/2015 05:15:56 am

My favorite week #3 post is Weiwei's post. It is really impressive that she has changed her website very much and not her website is one of the best. As far as I know, at the beginning of the semester she always struggled to improve her website because she is not a "technology" person. I know she dedicated a lot in this web page and she deserves my vote!
In addition, I really like her map in activity three since it is very detailed and makes sense. In terms of mapping and clustering, Dianna Guo and Cindy Chen also did a great job. Their maps are all very intriguing and clear.
However, there are also common problems we both have. The first one is that we forgot to diversify our post by adding links, photos and videos. On the contrary, Dianna's post has a lot of pictures and links, which makes her post one of the best.
Secondly, most of us choose some topics like friends, home and school life in free writing part and I think this is a little boring, lacking innovation and deep thoughts.
Last but not least, I strongly think that we can comment on each other's websites in order to make all of us improve our websites and writing skills.
All in all, we all did a great job!
Looking forward to next post.

Yuelin Guo (Dianna)

2/1/2015 08:10:55 am

I like George's page this week for him posting great pictures according to different activities. Moreover, I notice Yufei improved his blog a lot from the last time. More than the simple blog pages, he put "Coke tour by Yufei", which is very interesting for viewers to read. For activity 8, the collaborative writing part, I enjoy Weiwei and Xinxiu's work. They did a good job pointing out the part written by each of them and their writings go well with each other's. Weiwei also did a good job on the mapping. She used different color to highlight, which is creative and fun.
As most of us pointing out, our blogs lack diversity. We should put more pictures and links on our blogs to make them colorful and lead the viewers to develop new ideas.

George

2/1/2015 08:41:28 am

My favorite blog post of the week is Dianna's. Her blog post successfully combines images and her personal writing together. Also, as we talked in last class, font size actually matters. Dianna's font size is appropriate for readers to keep on reading. What I believe shows most of Dianna's effort is her activity three. She drew amazing pictures and arrows showing relationships between each subject. In addition, I also think Xinxiu's blog post is appealing because of her design and website layout. What I think we need to improve is still the elements other beyond words. To make a blog post appealing and attractive, images and some other media elements related are necessary. Also, I believe many of the blog posts are too short; sometimes more words can express people's ideas more clearly.

Yao Jiayu(Carol)

2/1/2015 09:01:20 am

I vote for Dianna's blog this week. Although they are all freewritings, Diannas express her thoughts about Tuan's book clearly. In Activity Two, she not only writes about what she agree with the author but also what she doubts about what the author says.
I also love her way drawing the map in Activity Three. Combining words with small drawing is a great way to express ideas.

Chris

2/1/2015 09:05:47 am

I like Dianna's blog post of this week. In my opinion, she structured her website to help the audience navigate more easily. The fonts she chose make it comfortable to read the posts. Also, I noticed that she included her contact information on the home page, which I think is one of the element that makes a website successful.
As for the post itself, she included a lot of pictures to help clarify the main topic of each exercise, and this makes the post seem more interesting than others. However, I think it might be appropriate to cite the sources of those pictures.
In the meantime, I believe most of us still need to add more interesting sources to our posts.

mengxuan chen

2/1/2015 10:15:20 am

I choose Wweiwei's website today, first of all, she changed her website, and it becomes very beautiful and fresh than before; second, her map is very interesting, I can tell that she puts a lot of efforts on the map, it contains details and her opinions.
However, I think her work can be more vivid if she doesn't follow too much format but really jot down everything she thinks.
After all, good posts!

Hyesuk Jang

2/1/2015 10:35:04 am

I choose Dianna because her free writing includes her own thought and expressions, and she clearly says her opinions about Tuan. Also, she combines well her posts with some images and a font size she uses is big, so images and bigger font size attract my concern and the bigger font makes me to read easily.

Even

2/1/2015 11:06:02 am

I like Xena's post for this week. First of all, her background is really eye-catching. When I first saw it, it really reminded me of my hometown, China. Also, I like other images on her website as well. The overall organization is very clear, and I like the space among each activities. One thing that many of us needs to improve, though, is still the multimodality of our website, such as how to make our blog posts more interesting.

Weiwei Zhong link

2/1/2015 11:35:57 am

I like Diana's blog posts the best. She utilizes the pictures to separate each writing activity, which makes reading more comfortable. She also draws a very nice map on the relationship between space, place and self, which is very impressive.
I also enjoy reading Xinxiu's blog, her settings of font makes the blog very clear to read. I like her ideas about what makes a good writing teacher. A good command of writing skills is a life long benefit.
We may try to use various multimedia to make our blog post more attractive. Some even small picture may add vitality to our blogs.
After reading the posts from our classmates, I find out that it is not an easy job to finish them. Thus, we may add some music into our post, to make reading more enjoyable.

Xena Huang

2/1/2015 12:54:57 pm

It's a hard decision to vote this week, since everybody seems to improve a lot. I voted for Even because I can see from the layout of he text that she put a lot of effort to explore the functions of the website.
The problem that we have in common is that we seems to focus on answering the question, and somehow not pay attention that we are writing a blog, which is more than pure text or plain layout.

Pan

2/1/2015 01:21:42 pm

Everyone improved a lot after the discussion in class. Among all the great posts these week, Jiayi's post was my favorite. For starters, she made the font of the content bigger and therefore easier to read. Jiayi kept doing a great job at keeping the post clean by having a well-organized post layout and structure. In addition, she also added a diagram with boxes and arrows that explained the relationship between space, place, and self. The diagram shows how much effort she had put into this post.

Shao

2/1/2015 01:52:37 pm

I would like to vote for Weiwei's blog post as my favorite one this week. My favorite piece of her post is Activity 3, the mapping, especially the "Questions about place" part. She addressed three questions step in step and answered each question. After answering the previous one, she was able to ask the next one. So by addressing these questions and answering them, she made a clear logic structure about "Place".

I think after several posts, most of us have improved a lot. If there's something we might work on, I think we can make our websites itself more attractive. We can add more interesting elements on our websites, such as flash, music, links to other sites, etc. We can even add more tags rather than the ones required by assignments.

Guangye Zhu

2/1/2015 02:50:12 pm

Personally i prefer young's blog post about the work shop and writing activities. First, her blog page uses a very clear and simple white/black thesis. I like such simple page design instead of fancy and complicated blog pages. Also, she uses "gear" photos to show the writing map about place and space. I think this is a very creative way to express her thought. It's clear to see that herself is the connection between place and space.

Lianyan Gu (Helen)

2/1/2015 02:54:22 pm

I like Diana's post mainly because of her background, which is very catching. I would love to know more about background from Diana and also discuss with her about her perception on the reading. However, I voted for myself because I think I did a good combination of the articles we read and my personal thoughts. I need to work on overall arrangement of my content and pictures on my blog posts.
Most of us still need to work on pictures in the blog posts and how to make our work more engaging and creative even though it is a writing assignment.

Caroline Luo

2/1/2015 03:15:16 pm

I vote for Diana this week because I love her clear and descriptive language to express her opinions. Also, I admire her design and layout of blog #3. I love her drawing for activity three and she did a good job!

The problem we have for this week's post is that we focus too much on the activities, the writing part, while ignoring the design of our post. Next time we need to find a balance between these two.

Mayer link

2/1/2015 04:06:37 pm

I voted for Dianna's blog. She tells us her own story in the free writing and explores Tuan's ideas in other writing activities really well. Also, she adds her opinions about the place and space, which I find really inspiring. Moreover, she has a very clear structure in every writing as well as delicate website, which is very attractive.

Qinyi She

2/1/2015 04:12:33 pm

I really like Carol’s post because she organized the post in an efficient and interesting way with multiple beautiful pictures and even a video. The photos are cute and related to the topic and the mapping she came up with is also well drawn.
I think we all improve this week since we discussed how to come up with a better blog post last week. However, it might be better if we can work on the layout of the page because some pages are misleading and hard to navigate. Moreover, I hope we can all work on adding more outside sources to our post to make it more eye-catching.

Zining Wang

2/1/2015 04:26:53 pm

I voted for Xena's blog. Her blog posts are easy to find and access. Her style and structure are simple and comfortable for readers. I love her mapping, and the picture is good. Other students like Yuelin, also did well on mapping and pictures.
Some students could do better by providing links to each blog. I sometimes spend too much time to access to blog3. But overall, everyone is good.

Yufei link

2/1/2015 05:35:11 pm

People will always care more about the pictures, videos than the words, especially in Twitter or Facebook. In blog posts, we need readers to pay attention to the words we write by putting beautiful pictures. That's what Diana does. I love her design for website, but I think the next time she posts a new blog post, there is no need to put so many pictures, where are kind of distractions. Just three to five pictures are fine. Besides Diana's website, I love Zirong's explanation of rootedness. She gives an original example to explain this abstract conception: when she learns some political facts, she always stands in the position of China to think. Overall, every one does a good job this week, and we really gain some skills of preparing for writing, combined with our deeper understanding of place, space and ourselves.

Cem

2/1/2015 06:24:12 pm

I vote for Dora's post. I really like how she used place as a connector for human and space, in her clustering. I think this is an interesting point of view because I always thought that the factor of 'human' would be the difference between space and place.

Most of us forget to ornament our blog posts with images. This week, there are more grammatical errors than usual. But, I think this is due to the freewritings we had to for activities. The idea of freewriting asks us to not correct our mistakes but rather keep on writing. So, I don't think the grammar mistakes are a big issue and I believe they will decrease in next week's blog posts.

Jiayi Ye

2/2/2015 01:02:44 am

I like Bella's blog post this week. Her ideas are In activity four, she tells a story in a movie to further illustrate how a person blends himself into a place. Furthermore, Bella's public writing is also attractive because she introduces a place Lhasa, which most of us could not think of. In addition, her revision for activity two is pretty good by adding more examples.
Some students did not design the post for this week. Adding more flash, photos could make a blog post more engaging.

Bella

2/2/2015 03:52:14 am

I vote for Mayer this week. Maybe his blog seems not so attractive for other people but I really can understand and also similar feeling as him in several aspects. For example, my hometown is also in the northwestern part in China and it is relatively remote and undeveloped compared to the coastal areas, however, I am still very proud of it when I talk to other people about it. Also I feel like having the same issue in writing as he: worrying about the structure and expression too much.
For all of us, i think the navigation of the website is still a little bit confusing. Also we still lack the ability to post the most relevant images for blogs.

Young Moo Yoo link

2/2/2015 03:53:55 am

I personally enjoyed reading Bella's blog post because her blog post is exceptionally well organized and she straightly pinches the point right away. On top of that, I love how she labels her activity three. She shows how she clusters and maps her idea. Additionally, she uses pictures in right places so that readers can not only focus on her reading but also have a better understanding.
What all we have to work on creating appealing blog posts by using relative photos. I think this happened because of the topic which is kind of vague so we had hard time finding images that perfectly fit into the blog.

Hae-Rim Lee

2/2/2015 04:42:55 am

This week I enjoyed reading Yufei's blog post 3. It was not only well organized, but also concise enough to understand his ideas at first time. I especially liked his activity 3 of mapping because it was visually well made. However, he could have added more ideas about place when he was doing activity 3. He could also have added some images that are related to his writings. Overall, it was a n outstanding blog post.

Minseo Kim

2/9/2015 09:36:00 am

I voted for Yufei's blog this week. He had a well-organized web page. He made it easy for readers to read what they were interested into. He also makes his idea really clear in his writing. I think we all can improve our writings by thinking in a more creative way.

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