I want to make some observations taken from reading through your blog posts that might help you later in other interactions.
Many of you are at or near graduation, have been on the job market or will be there soon. In that situation it would seem you want to be professional and act accordingly. The question is, what does acting professional mean?
If I switched this from how you communicate to how you dress (not my comparative advantage but it is easier to make the point that way) then there are some businesses which prefer formal attire while other businesses have gravitated to business casual. Formal attire conveys a certain solemn nature to the work. Business casual conveys a more relaxed view.
The same goes for the writing. Formal writing (such as in the course projects) is more solemn. Blogging, which is more informal and often represents early thinking on whatever the person is writing about, should convey a relaxed tone, especially if done well. I want to note that both types of writing are serious and require real effort. They are different, however, in that formal writing usually happens after the thinking is done - to write up the results - while informal writing is done while the thinking is ongoing - a work in progress, if you will.
Many students in the class seemed quite "measured" in their writing of the blogs, as if they feared to make a mistake. Being measured conveys that you've thought about what you say, but it also seems that you are not relaxed in saying it.
If you've gotten to know me at all over the semester, I like the combination of informal and thoughtful. I think it is appealing to others when it is delivered well. So we should ask, how do you get from where you are now to where you might be with this a few years out?
I may have told this story already in class, but in case not I will repeat it. My first semester at the U of I, fall 1980, I taught intermediate economics and was petrified about having to do so. It wasn't that I didn't know the economics. I was competent that way. What I didn't know was whether I could communicate about the economics in a way where the students would grasp it. As it turned out, the fear I had was rational. I didn't communicate with the students well at all and I bombed in teaching that course.
It's 37 years later and now the fear isn't there. I hope for you it doesn't take that long to become relaxed when writing or speaking in front of an authority figure. For that relaxation to happen, you need practice. Some of that will be stressful, but the fact of the stress doesn't lessen the need for the practice. So know that you do get better at this over time and consider our course as place where you started down this path.
There's something about the theory of learning you should understand that is relevant here. When you master something, much of it you can do autonomously, without requiring a lot of concentration. Until you've mastered it, however, the activity may take intense concentration and then the individual can't multi-process. One well known example is learning how to drive. The student driver, engaged in practicing proper driving technique, can't hold a conversation with the passenger in the next seat that is on a topic other than the driving. It's too difficult to do that. For the experienced driver there is no problem in having such a conversation, though if bad weather makes the driving hazardous, then again the conversation becomes difficult for the driver. This same sort of thing happens with both written and face to face communication. In that respect, most of the class is at teh student driver phase of blogging.
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