Commenting Review Week

The commenting part of this class has been very interesting. In most online classes you are required to do this type of interaction, forcing you to attempt to connect with your classmates. However, majority of the time you just do it because you are required to and respond to some boring discussion post on D2L. With this class I feel like the commenting process does a much better job of fostering connections. My favorite part of the commenting process is that we continue to comment on the introductions of all of our classmates the first time we interact with them. Reading the introductions is very interesting to me and I feel like I actually have an idea of who I am commenting to on my posts instead of the usual D2L format where I am just responding to a comment that has a name on it I have no idea what is behind the name. I have strongly enjoyed the commenting on both ends, commenting to others and receiving comments from others.

The class has been a Colosseum for building connections 

Source: Wikipedia

Writing Review Week

I have taken some time to review all of the writing assignments from throughout the semester thus far. Comparing this semester of writing to my other works throughout high school and college was quite interesting. This is by far the most writing I have done in a long time on a consistent basis. I think when you are writing a shorter story like we often write it is easier to pick something and run with it, for example, in many of my stories character development has been a major focus. I feel like that has been a huge development for me as I have learned to analyze how an author develops certain characters throughout stories and what role they want the character to play in the development of the plot. Personally, I feel like that has been my favorite part of the class is getting to see how much my writing and analyzing skills have grown due to the application of them on a weekly basis.

The Ramayana: Sums up our semester so far

Source: Wikipedia

Reading Review Week

This week i have read over all of my reading diary from the past weeks of this semester. While reading, I noticed that a few things stuck out. The main thing however, that stuck out to me, was the focus I put on Rama, Ravana, and Sita throughout my diary and storytelling posts. Obviously, these are the main characters of the story and deserve lots of attention. I think what stuck out about it though was the amount of attention I have not placed on minor characters throughout the past weeks. I briefly touched on Hanuman, Lakshmana, and Bharata in stories and in diary posts, but besides that I have put no focus on them. When reading through classmates work I noticed that this was very true for most of my classmates, not all, but most. The ones that did not struggle with this problem seemed to be using a deeper analysis of the story than most. This made me think that maybe I have not been using a deep enough analysis of each section we are assigned. However, I did state that I wanted to focus on Rama and Ravana early on, so maybe all of the major characters are just that much more appealing to the reader in this case. This all did strike me while reading my reviews so I am interested to see if i can do a better job bringing some attention into the roles of minor characters. The only thing I seem to be struggling with is how to not sacrifice my focus into main character development while bringing attention to the minor character development. Either way, I am excited for the second half of this semester and cannot wait to see what else unfolds as we venture into new readings.

Hanuman and Lakshmana before Sita and Rama

Source: Wikipedia