Blog Professor

     Are blogs either a great way of teaching or are they a terrible way of teaching? When students, such as myself, are asked to use blogs as a way to gather information, find ideas, or just to use blogs as an assignment, we tend to overlook the actual purpose for using blogs. It is quite common to find a student that is strongly against using a blog for many reasons but actually blogs are actually a great and unique way of teaching and it might surprise you as to why they are a great teaching tool. Blogs allow many people, students, teachers, and other peers collaborate on a single and/or ideas all at one time. This allows for great and in-depth arguments that encourage individual critical thinking and help strengthen one's ability to support their own argument with legit information. Blogs also helps inspire creativity, which has been lacking in many classes and teachings, and encourages users to become more interactive with each other and, rather brilliantly, causes team work because of all of these ideas being thrown around and then elaborated to create interesting beliefs, thoughts, arguments, and originality in developing topics.
     Loads of quite interesting information can be found at My English Pages (and click on the, 11 advantages of using a blog for teaching, slide show) as to why blogs should be used for teaching. This blog makes eleven claims, obviously, that are actually over looked when teaching using a blog(s). My English Pages makes a claim that states that "using a blog captures changes in thinking" and makes another claim that says "using a blog invites people to collaborate". I guess it was interesting to me because I never gave blogs that much of a thought when it came to group work until a read this quote and realized, "wow I have been doing this the whole time".
     Another reason as to why blogs should be used more often is because of the student's time. If you at what Yahoo Voice has said about this advantage to using blogs, it makes sense. When yahoo voice talks about timing and place, they make the case that when blogs are used for students, students tend to be much more open to the idea because "this advantage allows students who are busy with work, sports, and other commitments to read and understand content that they respond to outside of the physical classroom". Being that I am a student, I do find that simply finding time for work and school can be absolutely dreadful but blogs helped open some of my between class time to do other work for school.

What else makes blogs a great and interesting tool to use for teaching?
How can blogging be improved to help make learning better?
Is there a better way to teach other than blogging or teaching in a classroom?

Is it Stan Lee or Tony Stark

The blog article called, Building the Real Iron Man, is about a man named Rex Jameson, and fellow friends, pursuit to creating a working mechanical suit for the military. Many people have tried to create a fully functional suit for the last 40+ years with very little success.

The author, Gregory Mone, tries to grab the scifi, machine making, engineer, and Transformer's loving audience's attention by talking about the movie Iron Man which, at the time of the publishing, did not come out into theaters yet. He grabs their attention by describing something big trying to break through metal doors which turns out to be Iron man. He then talks about the work of Rex Jameson who, in a very similar way, is making a suit that can do the more realistic aspects of Tony Stark's Iron man suit. He tries to create an atmosphere for the audience that tells them that this once imagination driven, engineer's wet dream, is actually much closer than what was originally thought. He even throws in a few hyperlinks that lead to videos of the suit in action just in case there were those people that do not believe him.


Gregory Mone makes a very good end point to the article by generally saying that most people do not even know that we are at this point in today's engineering break through. He also makes references to other implications such as people with physical disabilities. The suits could at one point be able to support paraplegics and give them the ability to walk that they never had before or will have again. Quadriplegics can benefit from these suits just as much. These "Iron man" suits would be able to make so many physically challenged people feel normal and even the normal person would benefit from them also. The amount of benefits that can come out to these mechanical suits is staggering. 


How would day to day activities be changed because of these suits?
Why should we not be pursuing this engineering break through?
How would you use one of these suits?