Blog 12: Last Blog

Throughout the fall semester, I engaged in the process of learning a new skill to me, blog writing. To be honest, it seemes boring at the beginning but the more I got feedback and improved on my writing, the more fun the assignments became. One of the assignments I truly enjoyed working on was PRIV Blog 1. I would say it was the most fun out of the 11 blogs I had to write. Although it took the most time out of all the other blogs, I never felt tired even for a little bit. The reason I think I felt this way is because all of a sudden I felt like I knew what I was doing after so many blogs where I did not feel like I was writing good enough or giving them my all.

Fun was not all I had though. Some other blogs really taught me new things that will be stuck with me for a while. The most informative blog of all was ALG Blog 2. This is the only blog where I had to personaly engage with some tools, do my own research and then write about my experience thereafter. Now that I am writing about it, I realize how much I retained from the information I got from that whole experience. It is in this moment I realize that experience is indeed the best teacher.

Because of all the great feedback I received from my TA, I had to revise a couple of blogs. One blog I significantly improved was ALG Blog 1. The first thing I changed about the blog was the structure. On my first attempt, it was not even a blog but a bunch of bullet points that were very confusing to read. In my revision, I transformed the blog into one coherent flow of words so that my audience can get clarity on what questions I was answering. One of the skills I gained later in the semester that helped me to revise the blog was the ability to put myself in my reader’s shoes and think what if I was reading this without an idea of what question or assignment I was answering to.

In terms of my writing skills, one aspect this course has helped me improve on the most is the ability to just write even I have no idea what I am going to talk about and then improve as I go. This is very useful especially when I have to write for an assignment and I do not feel like it. Some of the aspects I struggled with included reformulating the discussion questions to fit the flow of the blogs I was writing. I am glad I struggled with this because it helped me to think greatly about my audience and its potential reactions.

With how I have gotten to enjoy writing blogs, I wish I could keep writing them for my other classes instead of typical essays because of how simple they are and genuinely relaxed when writing them. For an academic essay, I have to always give a great deal about small details and this can be tedious after some time, but for a blog I was mostly concerned with being informative and engaging which gave me more feelings of satisfaction.

At the beginning of the semester, my blogs seemed like chunks of information and almost as if I wrote them as fast as I can. I would constantly annswer questions without introducing them and the whole blog felt disconnected in my opinion. Over the course of the semester, this habit changed into a coherent blog with naturally sound texts that did not feel like independent chunks of text. However, one similarity across all my blogs has to be the theme of labor exploitation in the AI workforce. This theme kept coming back numerous times.

A topic I enjoyed writing about the most is Privacy. It was the most relatable of all and one I deeply resonated with the most. In Privacy blog, I liked how the questions asked me to expand on the case study and reflect on them. This pushed me to write more freely and deeply think about knowledge and beliefs regarding the issues presented.

By deeply thinking about the issues in the case studies, these blogs have helped me understand the course concepts better. Because the assignments encouraged me to bring my perspective into the blogs, I feel like it will be hard to forget the concepts learned during class and in the case studies. Everytime I come across concepts I have written about, I remember what I had to say about it and the solutions I contributed to the issues presented. When I was writing about Privacy, for example, I remember how ideas were flowing in my head so effortlessly because of how much I cared about the topic and how much I had learned through reading the case study.

To be honest, I do not see myself continuing with the current blog because some of the writings are very rushed and I did not really have much say in the appearance of the site. With that said, if I end up creating my own site, the works I put on here will serve a great deal of motivation, especially the blogs which I poured much into. Other content I wish to post is video podcasts of me talking about ethical issues in the world of tech. I think those type of content will help me to be a more knowledgeable and compassionate person. In the near future, I would love to keep writing about tech and in the same style as these blogs or the case studies I read, factual and straight to the point. I do not really like writing creative works so I do not see myself writing for an audience that prefers some sort of entertainement. One step I am going to take in order to reach that stage of writing informational blogs is to spend time reading case studies on topics I am curious about. Through these blog writing assignments, I realized I enjoy reading informational content on topics I am curious about.