United Tribes!

It’s been almost 10 weeks since our very first blogpost and almost the end to our journey on this blog (but with every ending to a chapter, we start again a brand new one J) We wouldn’t call these our final words, but we wish to draw some closure to our very wonderful semester with blogging, with our Business Applications class colleagues and Dr B. and of course, with one another in our team.

The road bumpy but adventurous…

As a team, we have a collection of about 70 posts! Kudos to every one of us in contributing in building the growing collection of blogposts!

Nonetheless, the beginning hasn’t been easy – with most of us struggling with our very first attempt in writing professional blogposts (instead of blogposts on our daily lives and random happenings in our lives).

When given the topic of ‘information technology’ and ‘business’, most of us felt restricted and were initially unable to find interests in this topic to write our blogposts on. It was until we ventured much deeper, we discovered the rainbow behind the dark clouds. As we experimented with various topics, we found what we like to write about and what we don’t. Some of us like to write on a variety of different topics every week while the others stay with a few topics of our interests.

We get bumps on the road occasionally –

• The beginning where we didn’t know how to work wordpress (publishing all our posts using the main account which makes it less organized)
• Where we tried to deliver one post every single day every week but failed due to limitations in our daily school work.
• Where we didn’t manage our blog properly (missing tags on some posts which are useful for searching convenience, not using widgets effectively on the sidebar)

As a team, we learnt from Dr. B, from our colleagues, from the internet –

• To create individual accounts and then, adding one another as administrators to the blog so we could access the blog from our very own account and access our individual blogposts from our own account
• To use widgets on the sidebar (how calendar view of blogposts could be more effective than archives for it provided more information, how putting the ‘tag cloud’, ‘recent comments’ and ‘recent posts’ widgets could be more user-friendly to our readers)
• To compromise – where we knew it was pretty difficult to make sure one blog post can posted everyday, we tried to create a regular schedule by updating regularly from Sunday to Wednesday!

Reaching the summit…

There is much to be said through our long journey in this blog.

We would like to thank Dr. B for constantly providing us with feedbacks, links, links and links to make our blog exude more professionalism. We are also grateful to our readers for your constant encouragement and comments throughout the whole period. Your wonderful comments are as insightful to us as we hope our blog posts are to you. Thank you and we really appreciate your time in reading our posts!

Some words from each of us:

Fanny –

Hello ! It has been a great one semester working on these blogs with my 6 other colleagues. It is both an enjoyable working experience and one which I really really benefited and learnt a lot from. Not only have I honed my skills in writing blogposts, I have learnt a lot through researching and also from the other blog posts of my colleagues (most of which are very interesting and I adore some of their writing styles!) It was also interesting to see how each of our individual’s interest in our team actually overlap one another and how we tried to explore one another’s topics in our own blog posts as well Thanks for the great working experience guys and girls!

Iris Ng –

It has been wonderful working with the team on this blog, and I must admit that I have learnt much more than I initially expected I would. I have learnt more in terms of technical usage of the WordPress site, but more importantly, how to communicate more effectively, by creating “conversations on the Web”, as Dr. B puts it. I am amazed by the creativity and awesome writing abilities of everyone in our class, and I have truly been inspired as I read the various blogposts on a myriad of topics, from green technology, to Facebook marketing, flash mobs and so much more. I really enjoyed seeing our posts generating comments and opinions, engaging our fellow colleagues through the power of the Web. Now, as I think back on how I was struggling with my first post, and contrasting it with the collection of blogposts now, I can’t help but feel proud of how far we have come. Great job, everyone! 🙂

Karen –

Wow, so we actually reached the end of this semester! Well, almost. While there are still some weeks full of exams and termpapers expecting us, our blogging in groups has come to an end, at least in the Business Applications class. I think we have learned a lot from each other as well as from other groups, whether we had technical problems with some tasks to fulfill (special thanks to our technical expert!), or we were struggling to find new ideas for the blogging, and of course getting to know so much insight in so many different topics! While I must say that I was not a fan of this kind of blogging in the beginning, I really learned a lot and in the course of time I experienced that it is not only a good way to find experts talking about your topic of interest but that it also can be a lot of fun to dive into the world of blogging.

I really appreciated our group work, thanks a lot, team members!

Julia –

It is unbelievable how fast this semester came to an end. Just a few more exams and most of us will have some time to rela, travel and explore the world.  We as a team made a lot of progress blogging on the topics of Information Technology and Business. As Fanny already said, we managed to publish more than 70 posts which makes me proud of our work. We learned a lot about blogging and how to use WordPress. I am really happy that I was a part of this team, everyone was motivated and contributed a lot to this blog. All together we covered many interesting topics. I want to thank everyone for the great job and also Dr. B for constantly providing us with help and advises on how we could improve our work. It was really inspiring!

Moon

In the beginning, I did not know where I was heading to. I think many of you have seen my stupidity in that sense. On the very first day, I was just wanting to open an online shop so I thought I could learn how to open it in the course of my blogging. Then, I found myself so bored by blogging and started sneaking around other blogs and learning from my classmates then finally I found what I was interested in! Chrome, web-browsers, Chromebook and Cloud, and so on. As I have run into the end of this course, I found that I was quite keen to know about Chrome and Google’s Apps. And, finally, I succeeded at importing WordPress to my SQL, which I thought I would never be able to do it on my own. So, I was jumping up and down for a while. I thought a wall between me and IT would be really high. But, now, I got courage to face computer related problems and I got interested in solving them. That is important to me. Thanks to Dr. Bruce and my classmates!!