Toughness Test

King, Vivian and I created a game that represents the first day of a journalist's working life. We hope to introduce the working ethics of the journalism industry and the major attitudes that a journalist should possess. Although not everyone of us would become journalists in the future, we feel that sometimes, especially during tough times, we are often like them - we stand up from where we are defeated. Try it out and we would love to hear your feedback :) 

No Blog is an Island: How Blogging Connects Us

Blogging, to me, is more like a social activity. It is a kind of interactive writing that I feel like I'm purposefully blogging about some issues which are new, interesting and related to a group of specific audience (yes, it's you!).

Blogging, however, is not simply about inputting my ideas. It's rather like incorporating the ideas of mine, yours, and many others. This is how blogging cultures form, and more importantly, how my identity as a blogger is reinforced.

Ideas are open knowledge

In other words, I'm actively playing the role of connector when I'm blogging. When I was writing the first post, I found that some of us actually addressed the same issue in different ways. Therefore, apart from commenting, I bring our classmates' ideas into my posts as well, so that we could learn about the same issue from more perspectives, and moving one step forward, establish our own interactive learning community (the same thing is unlikely to happen if we only consult academic references!). This takes time of course, yet after all, it's really enjoyable - I learn to appreciate the good works from all of us, and by sharing our ideas, I could know more about our personalities, point of view and perceptions, together with expanding my scope of knowledge in new media. 

Likewise, in my second post, I did a more intensive research and presented the prevailing issue about smartphones, using the ideas of mine and others, plus the recent user statistics available online. Again, during the process, I came across with a diversity of opinions which were quite surprising (throwing smartphones into the bin if we want to redeem our life!). I attempted to reorganize all the ideas I collected in an interesting way in order to encourage us - users of smartphones - to share our daily experience, as I believed commenting is one valuable way of voicing what's on our head.

Stay hungry for ideas

Concisely, blogging is absorption, execution and extension of ideas. By reading what classmates and other writers write about, I absorb their brilliant ideas and broaden my horizons. By using plain language, simple left-right layout and appropriate visual elements, I intend to convey ideas in the way that everyone feels comfortable with. By commenting and referring to classmates in my posts, I extend the scope of issue and hopefully we would have a better picture of what's ahead in new media. So blogging is a blend of three elements. And to me, it's truly satisfying - it requires even more systematic thinking than writing term papers, yet meanwhile, I could learn from classmates and subsequently improve my writing. This subconsciously redefines the meaning of blogging: it's a personal platform for expression, and a social platform where continuous exchange of ideas take place. And there is no end of blogging, if the world keeps running.

Did you have a challenging time drafting what to blog for each post?

Last few lines

You are most welcome to check out my comments made on Vivian's (1 / 2 / 3), Noc's (1 / 2 / 3), King's and Edith's blog, plus replies to comments on my blog (1 / 2 / 3). By the way, I would like to thank everyone for bringing into a variety of topics with our inspiring views. I never know new media is such a hybrid community that relates closely to journalism (check out Edith's, Ken's and Noc's blog for detailed analysis), video/game production (read Alex's post on how gaming relates to story-writing) and communication theories (see Joanne's defense on online reading). Now I think I'm really in a complicated relationship with ideas, words, hypertexts, images, visual space, layout, typography, or simply multimodality. A good new media writer has to be multimodal. And I shall never cease from exploration. :)

Closing Credits

The phrase 'Ideas are open knowledge' is from Paul Arden, author of long-time international bestseller It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be. Read the full chapter here.