Connecting The Dots
I feel the prompts for the blog posts have been designed in such a way that a student must recall information and make connections from previous classes to write a quality blog post. I believe we started off with transactions costs and slowly transitioned into opportunism. By the time we hit the third and fourth blog posts, I feel my posts were heavily influenced by these posts naturally. To elaborate, I feel I brought up the themes of opportunism and transaction costs organically rather than forcefully.
Although the prompts did guide us briefly to referencing those concepts. For example, in my post on working in a team I referenced the concept of opportunism frequently and I noticed some of my teammates referenced transaction costs. In my next post about Illinibucks I had referenced transaction costs heavily and opportunism briefly. Going off last Thursdays class session, I believed this week’s blog post would be on creativity in the workplace. This topic would have been interesting to see how students link the concepts of transaction costs and opportunism.
At first, I did not like the concept of writing comments and blogs in general. However, for this class I feel the blog posts do help me as a student as it gives me an opportunity to show my understanding in my own life experiences. Hence, you can not memorize concepts but you have to have a solid understanding of the concepts when you write a post. I also felt that writing comments for other students was a waste of time. The professor feels that we should write comments as it gives us practice in providing feedback. To me personally, that does not make sense as I feel I have ample experience of giving feedback. However, I personally feel that writing comment makes it necessary to read what your classmates are posting. As a result, I am able to further my understanding by reading their posts and the comments the professor posts on their posts.
By reading the posts of my teammates it also provides a benchmark for how my posts should be in comparison to theirs. For example, should I have more detailed content, should my posts be more in length, and etc. Furthermore, I feel this has also evolved my own writing style and my own writing process. I remember in the beginning the blog posts were more of a chore, but now the prompts are more interesting and you have to think before writing. In that way, I feel the prompts also make me more organized as a writer as I have a basic plan on how to approach the prompt.
I feel currently the prompts are very well thought out and hence it is easy to connect the concepts we learn in the class to our blog posts. Hence, I do not have any problems with the blog prompts and don’t really have a recommendation for what I would like to see. However, one thing that I feel would be beneficial to me personally is commenting on current events. I would like to break into banking as my career choice, and in many interviews you have to comment on what is happening in the world. Hence I feel writing future blog posts based on real scenarios would be very beneficial from an analytical point of view. For example, on the top of my head I feel we could have written about the UBER fiasco regarding their CEO Travis K. I feel that we could have linked transaction costs when a company goes through the process of change in leadership.
Regarding your last paragraph, you are free to write on something other than the prompt. But you must then tie that into course themes. It is surely a good habit to be reading the business section of a newspaper quite regularly or to find pieces about business and economics in more general interest periodicals. Also, National Public Radio and the PBS News Hour doing business stories on a regular basis. You are welcome to write about that if it is a topic that interests you.
ReplyDeleteAs to your example of what to write about, there are so many stories of how companies act neither in the interest of their clients nor in the interest of their employees. It might be more fun and more useful to find some stories about companies whose business model seems to be working and where the company is doing socially good. Understanding why it is working would be good and useful.
As with many other students you focused on two of the class concepts - opportunism and transaction costs. I want to note some others. During the first week of the class (before we got into blogging) I talked about Akerlof's model of Labor Markets as Partial Gift Exchange and more broadly about collegiality as a basis for productivity in the organization. We then talked about Herbert Simon's Nobel Prize address, that complexity is the underlying issue that organizations need to grapple with, that one way to manage uncertainty that complexity produces is to have buffers, and that we satisfice rather than optimize.
I will be considering some of these in class on Tuesday, just to emphasize that I can't have you blog on everything, that we do talk about other issues in class (such as creativity), and incorporating some of these other ideas into your posts would be a good thing to be doing.
I might blog on current events if can relate it to the topics we have learned in class. I have no issue in following the prompts as well. I feel the prompts are easier as they guide you and help me be more of an organized writer.
DeleteOverall i agree with your blog post. But, you said that you think that you have ample experience comments on others peoples work. I found that this was a contradiction with what you said after, about practicing writing. In my experience I have been commenting on peoples work for as long as I have been writing, this is mainly due to the fact that I do both of them in my school work. I also think that I will always be able to improve in both my writing and my commenting. Why is it that you think you have been able to finish your growth in one but not the other?
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