I see this course, Emergent Media, as a great opportunity to learn more in depth about the things I already know with the media and today’s world. I think this class will also help me expand on my skills as a Mass Communications student and journalist. Additionally, this class has already provided me with the first steps and basic knowledge of networking, which is great. By the end of this course I plan to continue use the social media accounts I was required to create for the course and the things I’ve learned and will learn, to position myself as a professional and presentable to job opportunities. I have never taken an online course, so it is also a cool experience how to work from my computer and learn the ways of school from online. I have also never made a blog, posted blogs, and read blogs at a minimum, so that is something new for me that I am excited to work with. I find the two units we covered so far to be very interesting and have come across many intriguing facts and statistics in the class’s book. For example in chapter one, the following study really grabbed my attention, “There are now 2.4 billion internet users worldwide, and they send and receive 300 billion e-mail messages every day; users of Twitter generate 500 million tweets per day; and Facebook reports that 100 million photos are uploaded each and every day”(Potter). Wow! Reading those statistics along with some other ideas in the text made me take a step back and realize that our society today really is revolved around technology and our everyday media. With that being said, it makes perfect sense to obtain as much information possible about media and use it to benefit myself as a student and person of today’s generation. I feel this class can provide me with these techniques. In the introduction to this course we read and watched about the idea that our brains have “automatic routines” and when it comes to social media, we filter out what we want to see and hear and what we don’t. The way this course expanded on that idea seemed that it was approached from some scientific and psychological standpoints which was also very absorbing to me and showed me that this course will teach me a lot.

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.