Reflexive Piece

2008 was a year which produced many new challenges and experiences, especially for those of us studying first year journalism at Rhodes University. 2008 was the second year your truly studied first year journalism at Rhodes, giving addage to the old expression "if at first you don't succeed try again". Although i studied jms1 again, that is not to say it was all the same. In fact, the 4th term presented a whole new course: blogging. My lecturers would argue that due to the fact that blogging is a genre in itself, the work produced for this section would have to have been planned within the constraints of the genre as opposed to the first term in which most of the processes were individual. I tend to disagree somewhat with this evaluation. Although we were made to work in groups for this course, i still believe that a majority of our processes were individual. With the exception of coming up with a name for the blog and deciding on the other admin details such as what we would like the homepage to look like, the only other piece of real "group work" was the photo comic. Other than that all blog posts were individual processes and we were given the individual freedom to construct them. With every single piece of academic work at University there are assesment criteria, blogging was no different. We were required to write in a certain style and had to include aspects of the genre into our posts. This was no different to the first term when we did newswriting and had to follow criteria for our writing, such as what onstitutes a hard news story and how to structure one.

Story ideas were not too hard to come up with. The fact that we were students writing posts for a student blog made our jobs much easier. If we were perhaps lecturers in the department of journalism the task would have been much more difficult because as lecturers we would have been less in touch with student issues and thus content material would have been a little harder to come by. So to an extent my writing was supported by the character of my group's blog. The character was very much true to the overall theme of journalism this year - a first year at Rhodes.

As the first year journ clas of 2008 were the first ever class to participate in a blogging course at Rhodes we could be viewed as Guinea pigs. As such there was always something to discuss in tutorials. The tutors were new to the material, as were the lecturers so communication on all fronts was vital. In all honesty though i feel that tutorials were a waste of this time for this course. Anyone attending lectures would be familiar with the subject material and as such our tutors were not responsible for teaching us but rather served as mediators while we engaged in discussion with our group members. Tutorials did present a good forum for us to express our individual ideas and thoughts and allowed us to brainstorm and make decisions as to what we would do for our various assignments. At the same time this is something i did not enjoy fully, bcause as a group member one is forced to go with the majority decision and that decision may sometimes be one that is completely opposite to ideas that you yourself may have had.

On a scale of 1-10 in terms of personal and proffesional goals i would give this course a 7 out of 10. The Internet is an ever-growing commodity and as such this foray into the world of blogging is a wise one as it opens up many new doors for aspiring journalists. At the same time i believe i would have been capable of running a blog whether i had done this course or not. A lot of the skills we were "taught" could be seen as basic computer literacy and common sense skills. So in that aspect i did not learn much.

Blogging is most definitely a form of journalism and that is one vital aspect of this course i will take away with me. It is a form of what i would call "public journalism" and perhaps that is the best kind as the general public to not have corporate agendas to adhere to. Obviously individuals will never be completely objective but by examining a number of posts by various members of the general public one is allowed to form their own opinions. Reserach and sourcing was very much the same. Ethics were not a concern and i don't believe my writing changed too much.

On the whole i enjoyed this section and would definetly recoomned the journ department continue with this next year.