One thing that this reading focussed on is the similarities and differences between blogs and other writing mediums such as journals and diaries. I found this particularly interesting because last semester in Writing Media Texts, we were using hand-written journals and I rather enjoyed this process. Both are common in the sense that they are a place (mainly for the writing) of ideas, reflections and activities, they provide a record of learning achievements and they are space where one can express doubt about their knowledge (unlike an essay or report). However, the journals we kept were rather private aside from when they were being marked by our tutors. Blogs, on the other hand are the polar opposite, anyone and everyone can essentially view our posts. This, I feel will take some getting used to, as when I write in a journal or a diary I generally write in quite a personal tone – sometimes making up words that only I would really understand. So in this way, I think that using a blog will help me to improve my writing skills in several different forms, as well as improving my ‘cyber’ literacy due to the fact that blogs enable the use of hypertext, allowing me to link my posts to other blogs and webpages.  In saying this, there is a beautiful quality to a hardcopy journal and as a mainly visual learner I like to draw a lot of my ideas and also use mind maps and other visual ‘tools’ to organise my writing.

Typing rather than hand-writing can also be of benefit to the ‘learning experience’ encountered when creating a blog. I think typing fosters ‘better’ writing because the author is able to edit their work or parts of it much more easily, enabling for constant improvement to their posts. In addition, if my blog was hand-written it would end up being pretty private anyway on account of my disgraceful penmanship!