Blog Reviews

#1

I do not feel particularly qualified to review anyone else’s blog being such an amateur myself. So I really feel I am giving my impressions as learner or more realistically, a mere reflection of my personal taste in reading materials. With that disclaimer noted, here is my first review of Berb’s Blabber. I stopped at Mr. Berb’s on my way down the ‘Course Participants’ list because his pictures in the last blog caught my eye. I especially liked the picture of what New York Harbor would look like if all the ice sheets melted. That is the picture that made me want to see what he had to say.

His blog reads like a story. He has a ‘hook’ in his first sentence that draws the reader in. Mr. Berb is very good at compacting the information from the terrestrial ice module. Why didn’t I think of just listing all the factors in one paragraph? That little action let him focus on one major idea. His link to the NPR story that compares a stock market crash with a fish population crash was pretty cool. I need to become a better web surfer!

I looked back at his beginning blogs and he has grown and developed in his reporting like many of us have. I think the thing I enjoyed most about his blog is that he was not overly scientific. He doesn’t overwhelm us with vocabulary. His style will have a broader appeal than some of the more technical ones.

#2

I have looked here and there at other’s blogs and found many to be awesomely full of personal life experience connections in every module, Ben’s Explore Alaska Blog; and others that seemed like real blogging as pertains to what I thought the word ‘blog’ means, you know, write whatever comes into your pretty little head. But today I stumbled upon one I had not tapped before, Native Science. It is an account written, it seems, through the eyes of someone seeing Alaska for the very first time.

Alaska Native’s style is fun and informative. It seems her discoveries from studying the information from this course have made her a bit sad. She talks of ‘reality checks’ at every turn, a little burst in the bubble of seeing the grandeur of Alaska. I especially like the fact that she has quotes in all of her blogs. I may have to read Two Old Women by Velma Wallis. Hers is a more personal connectedness to the material than most of the other blogs. I always like blogs with pictures in them, and she has some different ones. I wonder if she took them herself.

She also shares a lot of conversations she has had with people living the Alaskan subsistence lifestyle. Having been ‘adopted’ by a Native family and having that experience of sharing with them must be a pretty powerful perspective of what is happening in Alaska.

Finally, she has a little rating system or vote of some kind in each blog. That makes it a little more interactive. Her glacier jokes are a welcome touch. Thanks, Alaska Native, your blog is almost like reading a diary.