Testimonials

Kate Bowman Johnston
Student Activities Coordinator
Calvin College

Working in student activities at Calvin College has afforded me the invaluable opportunity (and daunting task) of investigating the landscape of popular culture. As such, I invest a great deal of energy in staying up to speed on the events and trends that collectively comprise the pop culture behemoth.

Often, I learn about these by talking with colleagues and students, reading magazines, and perusing news websites, but the advent of blogging has made it possible for me to find out how a variety of people—from PhDs to ordinary citizens— feel about, react to, and interact with what’s happening in pop culture.

Matthew Kuperus Heun
Associate Professor
Calvin College Engineering Dept.

A few of my thoughts on the weblog that we did for the South Africa interim class:

* I have watched the blogging phenomenon since its beginning, being an avid reader of scripting.com since its inception, since before the word “weblog” existed, actually. I never felt the desire or need to do a personal blog, but I was really happy to try the technology for this interim class. I think blogging is very appropriate for the situation where you want to inform a pretty wide audience of details of group activities. The capability for comments and other feedback from readers provides added value.

* I am extremely pleased with how our blog turned out. I printed the blog and was amazed to see 54 pages of student-generated content. If I had told the students prior to our departure that they would be responsible for 50+ pages of content in a class journal, I might have had a revolt. But, the blog provided an organic way to develop the content in an incremental way AND keep stakeholders (parents, adminstration, etc.) updated on our progress at the same time. The whole process with the blog was extremely beneficial to the success of our class, from my point of view.