I found this class's emphasis on the utilization of blogs and YouTube videos to be both beneficial and cumbersome.
Writing the blog was an interesting exercise every week. It facilitated our learning and digestion of the material, while serving as an externally visible piece of work that we could show to interested parties. Overall, I found that making each week's deliverable two blogs posts was a good way to facilitate our knowledge of intellectual property issues and news. On the other hand, I did not find our YouTube channels to be very instructive. While it may have been helpful for other students in helping them to practice their public speaking skills, I personally felt comfortable delivering my YouTube videos in one run through, and did not find them helpful from a personal or professional development standpoint.
I have a similar response to the comments on other students' blogs and videos that we wrote every week. I did find it interesting to read other students' blogs, and found that commenting on them was a useful way to give and receive feedback on our ideas and perspectives. Commenting on other students' YouTube videos, however, was cumbersome and difficult. I found that it was difficult to provide feedback on the videos due to the length of the videos and the structure that most students, including myself, utilized in the videos, and that I usually had to refer to the related blogs in order to fully understand what most people were saying. While I could see the value that these comments provided, I feel that the same feedback regarding content could be provided in a more structured and concise manner by commenting on the related blog posts.
Utilization of blogs and YouTube is definitely a departure from the traditional learning tools of lectures, homework, and tests that most classes utilize. I found that this class structure did result in me putting in more effort each week, and that I will most likely retain the information better as a result. However, I found this structure to be repetitive after a while, due to the straightforward and structured nature of each blog post and video. If I had to do this class all over again, I would improve by investing more time into each blog post, ideally being able to pull from multiple sources to discuss different perspectives on each issue.
I further discuss my thoughts on this topic at the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq4U-pigxlI
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