Evaluation of your blog experience

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you. Beatrix Potter

Tin Phones

When home telephones were the luxury of a few fortunate owners--quite popular and respected in the neighbourhood--kids used to play with a more economic and democratic device: a "telephone" made up of two empty tins connected by a long string. You spoke to one empty tin while your playmate listened to you with one ear on the other empty tin and then spoke back to you... that was communication!

From the caveman onwards, communication has always been used as a means to highlight his presence on earth, to survive, to transfer acquired knowledge, to create links with future generations... Proof of this is the presence of petroglyphs, prehistoric paintings in caves, graphs carved on stone... In time, writing became a usual form of communication.

Chinese Manuscript

Chinese writing probably started as far back as 1500 BCE and is perhaps one of the oldest means of communication. The Latin alphabet was created about 600 BC. Writing manuscripts in ink became then a common practice. At first, manuscripts were handwritten and replicated by uneducated people who could not read what they wrote, thus information and secrets were conveniently kept for the privileged, educated people.

A long-time passed until Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1438-1468) changed the primitive printing techniques to a breakthrough that persisted in time: he invented a movable type printing machine that permitted to reproduce a significant number of issues. He could not get funds to continue his project and passed away without living the splendour of his revolutionary device, but he certainly foresaw its importance and, most likely, figured out a world with books moulding an illustrated man.

First Mobile

Printed material in the form of letters and books has provided man a powerful source of communication and learning that has been essential in his progress and has added modernity to older, less sophisticated ways of communication, such as the manuscripts used by our ancestors to transfer knowledge; the messenger pigeons, aka homing pidgeons, used as mail carriers; the smoke signals used by castaways and Indians; the Morse code used to ask for help mainly in war; ...

In the last decades, technological advances have significantly changed the way we communicate and transfer knowledge to one another with inventions such as mobiles (especially smartphones) and computers. We started by sending e-mails and we are now reading electronic books, downloading scientific papers, creating webpages and websites, writing blogs, twitting, using facebook...

J. Gutenberg would probably be in a state of despair observing this chaotic, yet organized, way of communication...magical (not mechanical) machines delivering printed documents in seconds... "e-mails" disappearing from the screen of a strange box and sent to people in other countries...friends in front of the box chatting and shopping... guys reading their facebook...

However, using the internet and its applications is currently a necessity, an opportunity and a pleasure. I confess that via blogging I have enjoyed both writing the posts and reading yours. Blogging is a public, yet personal way of expressing yourself, allowing you to have a glimpse into my world and allowing me to share part of yours. I hope you have enjoyed this blogging activity as much as I have so that it continues to be useful to improve your writing abilities in English.

Now it's your turn:

What you think about the experience in general
How much you feel your writing skills have developed
What you would like to include in the future
What else you would like to write about

Wordcount: 200
Make comments on 3 of your classmates' posts and the teacher´s post