Metacognition: Blogging

It’s been quite a year. This is one of my last blog posts, I believe, and I’m not sure what to think.

The natural response is that through blogging I have become better able to understand myself. That’s a lie though. I suppose logically, it makes sense. When one is spewing ideas through writing, it should be easier to see aspects of one’s self.

For whatever reason, however, this is not how it worked out for me. Everything I typed I already consciously knew about myself, whether or not the corresponding thoughts existed years before I wrote the blog post, or days, before I actually wrote anything I already had the thoughts formulated in my head.

While I didn’t learn anything from the actual blog posts themselves, I’d argue that I learned from the blogging experience as a whole, and the actual process of blogging. Most obviously, I learned a lot about other people by reading their blogs. But, past that, I learned something that I’m having trouble articulating, in regards to the freedom of blogging.

Aside from very general guidelines, the blogs allowed us to rant regarding pretty much whatever was on our minds. The process of blogging helped me greatly in articulating ideas, bringing them from my brain to the web. Blogging also had a different level of “seriousness”, and I approached them differently than I did other assignments.

All of these things, factors of the act of blogging rather than the content of my blogs, allowed me to draw away skills and experience in working on things that are perhaps more casual, but just as important.