Childhood Obesity

When this year and class first began I was very apprehensive about the idea of a “blog” as part of a class. Typically when I hear the term, the first think I think about is a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook. How this could apply to a college course was beyond me.

However, as the semester progresses and I continue to build upon my course work, I see the importance of keeping this blog more and more. One of the main goals of my risk communication project on childhood obesity is to reach out to a large audience. Blogging is a great way to do that!

Creating an online blog is a great way to “write for the public,” which is the main idea of this course. A large percentage of public writing in today’s world is done online. In putting my course work and ideas onto a blog, it makes it open and available to the public eye. In our society, the first place most people look for information on any given topic is the internet. It provides us with a quick and easy resource for practically anything.

Putting together a risk communication portfolio and making it available online ensures that people all across the country (and world) have access to the information. Childhood obesity is a nationwide problem is today’s society. I can only hope that posting my course work online will help it reach out to people all around.

In addition to spreading my work, blogging was an easy way for me to link with my classmates. Having all of our course work posted online allowed me to keep up with their progress. I think this was essential to maintaining good class discussions and provided guidance at any times where I was not quite sure what was expected of me.

All in all, I have to say that my opinion of blogging has changed throughout the course of this semester. Instead of thinking of it as part of social networking (and a waste of time), I can now see the many benefits of networking with others through the internet.