Connecting the dots

The most obvious themes that I saw with all my blog posts were economics and how organizations work. Since that is the name and the purpose of the class I do not think that this is what was meant by the prompt. I am going to assume that everyone in this class has written about those themes in each of their posts. In all my blog posts, I have loosely touched on opportunism and/or the lack of it. I do not think that I have done a great job explaining that in every one of my posts, but each one of my posts talks at least alluded to it. I think that opportunism is a part of working as a group, and while I may not have noticed or talked about it in my earlier posts it definitely was on my mind and influenced what I was writing. I also loosely talk about how organizations are structured in my blogs. Every one of my posts talks about a different group I have been a part of. I then talk about the way that those groups functioned, who was in it, and what the purpose of the group was. Like opportunism I do not think that this is extremely clear, but group structures have been a running theme in my posts.

Yes, there are ways to connect the prompts to course themes. The prompts are meant to be a place to start the blog post. I should be able to internalize the themes of the class, and then be able to connect the prompt to what we have been learning in class and the class homework. I rarely think about connecting my blog posts to the homework. I think that by adding a segment in each of my posts about what we learned in the homework and how that relates to the prompt of my blog posts I would be able to greatly improve my writing. I also have not talked about downstream and upstream divisions. The downstream and upstream divisions of an organizations is an effective and useful way to look at any group. Too me, it is now much more obvious how the actions of a groups are dictated by what they are doing, who they are doing them for, and what each group hopes to gain from the interactions between the two groups.

When I first started writing my blog posts I tried to get each post down as fast as I could. I treated them as a chore. I would look at the prompt, write the first one or two things that I thought about down. I would then extrapolate on those ideas until my post was long enough.  After which I quickly glance over the post to make sure that there was not any glaring flaws or problems with it. I have slowly been giving more time, effort, and care to writing my post. I now read the post prompt, and write a sentence or two right before I go to the gym. After an hour or two I will, sit down and write out a full post. I them make sure to reread the post at least twice before I post it to my blog. While writing I try to make connections between the prompt and what we have been learning in class.
This mostly came about because I started taking the blogging seriously. While blogging may not be my favorite thing to do. I do what can be gained from the blogging, and I truly believe that it will help me in the long run. The way I write my posts has changed mostly because of this. I am taking the writing more seriously. This means that I try to make sure to give each blog post the time and attention that I need to understand what the blog post is asking. I also spend more time on actually writing the post.


I would like to see posts that have a variety of way to answer them. The more different the answers from the posts, from my other group mate’s posts and the discussions we have in class, the better my understanding of the prompt and the themes we have been discussing in class. This also has the added benefit of making it more interesting. When I read my group’s posts and we each talk about different thing I am forced to reexamine my ideas on the prompt. This leads to a better understanding of the subject matter in general. I think that I am learn more about what we are talking about this way. This is especially true when we talk about the posts in class. Each different subject is a slightly different take on the themes that we are learning about. Also, I personally learn better this way. As a side benefit I find the conversations more interesting when there is a variety of things being discussed. 

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanOctober 14, 2017 at 11:33 AM

    I suppose you should be rewarded for being straightforward. There is some virtue in that. I do like it if students get at causality some in their posts. Since in your second paragraph you talked about things that you haven't done to this point but that might improve the experience for you, the question is why not.

    In the third paragraph you then talked about trying to get the posts done as fast as possible. That is one reason why not. But to use that reason in paragraph two, you needed to have mentioned it already. If you give some time to the pre-write, which does encourage you to think through what to include in the post, you might also add a little effort to the sequencing of what you say.

    You then reported that you started to take the blogging seriously. I'm glad you did, so I don't want to discourage that at all. But I'm left in the dark as to why that happened. If you can shed some light on what changed for you, that would be both interesting to read and potentially useful to me as a teacher, depending on what really was the cause.

    Your last paragraph I find somewhat baffling. You seem to assume there were only one or two ways to till with earlier prompts. I should note that another student said essentially the opposite in his post, that the prompts were too open ended and he wished they were more directed so he was sure he was on the right track. In any event, I am not trying to pigeon-hole students into particular answers with the blogging, and I will remind you that you can ignore the prompt entirely and write about something else, as long as you can tie what you are writing about to class themes. Let me say one last word on this. The students in our class are all Econ majors. Particularly the ones who are in state may be drawing on similar experiences. International students write posts that are different because their experiences are different. If you have a larger range of potential experience to draw upon, it might help you with creating variety in your posts.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Francis Edgeworth Econ 490 Fall 2017October 14, 2017 at 1:47 PM

    I also was not a fan of blogging, however further on the prompts made me a bit serious about the blog posts. I feel the prompts are neither open ended or close ended, I feel there is a god balance. Although, I do feel the word limit of 600 words is a bit more than I like.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Traditional last post

I think that the most valuable lesson that I learned from class is how to look at organizations. Before taking this class I rarely thought about the reason that organizations were the way they were. This class has given me a sound understanding of the basics. This ground work enables me to be able to look at an organization and understand the forces and reasons that it is the way it is. While I think that this is an enormously valuable skill to have it is a bit vague in regard to this post.  If I were to be a bit more specific I would say the transaction costs was an extremely useful lesson that we learned in class. Nearly every economics professor I have taken a class with talked about transactions costs, if only in passing. This is the first class were I fully understood what transaction costs are and how they related to other economic ideas. I do think that a part of this is the article that my team read. I would not have as strong as a grasp on transaction costs if I did not r...
Read more

Summer internship

During a summer internship, I was on a team of 5 people including myself.  We were hired to digitize paperwork that the company had in storage. The company was in construction and they had to hold onto the paper work in case of law suits. The company was moving which meant that we had to finish before the summer was through. We had to scan, name, and organize about 56 boxes in 13 weeks. This means that every week we had to do a little bit more than four boxes. When we were hired, our supervisor showed us the storage room with the boxes, explained how to label and save the documents in the computer, and how to scan the documents. After we scanned the documents we then had review the documents to make sure that they scanned correctly. If this was the case we were supposed to throw away the paper files.  Every Friday our supervisor would count the remaining boxes, this was the only time that they would check on our progress.  Occasionally an intern would be taken off sc...
Read more

Group behavior

In Ocean’s 11 (2001) a group of eleven men, gather together to rob a casino in Las Vegas. As a side note the Las Vegas Strip and pretty much everything that Las Vegas is known for is actually in Paradise, Nevada. Paradise is an unincorporated town, which allows the casinos to pay fewer taxes. The leader of the group (Ocean) is trying to get his ex-wife back from the man who runs the casino that the group is going to rob.  This leads to a conflict between the group. While the majority of the group are only there for the heist, Ocean and his friend are there for the money and Ocean’s ex-wife. In the beginning the rest of the group does not know about Ocean’s secondary mission. Throughout the movie more people find out about it, until the problem comes to head and everyone confronts Ocean. Ocean’s motivations are pretty simple, he loves his wife and so he wants her back. The heist is a way for this to happen, while allowing him to mess with his wife’s current boyfriend. The rest ...
Read more