Adios Señor Dictador!

Despite the title of this last blog entry for Span312, I'm actually a little sad to see it pass by. But, that just may be the nostalgia talking, making me forget the hours of torment that was I, the Supreme and Facundo (although I really do appreciate them both now) as well as the hours spent staring at the Dictator Novel article on Wikipedia. I actually really liked the class, I liked the way that it was structured in the way that the reading order of the novels made sense and built on one another.

I wasn't so fond of the blog entries, although they did a good job of making sure that you were keeping up with the reading material, and I probably won't continue blogging as I am too lazy for that at this stage in my life.

I thought that the Wikipedia assignment was very inventive as opposed to the usual paper or exam. I had previously used wikipedia a lot at work for looking up information for customers on books that I didn't personally know about, as well as for looking up things at work when I was bored, lazy, wanted to kill some time or all of the above and had learned fascinating things (Did you know that a male platypus has poisonous barbs on its flippers?) and had become somewhat familiar with how it operated. However, having to edit and create an article myself gave me a very good perspective of the article making process, and how to spot the good ones from the bad ones. Although I was one of the "shy" people at first when it came to editting, I think that I did manage to get into it and I think that I will continue to edit various wikipedia articles that I am personally interested in that may not necessarily have to do with school. Oddly, I found the project kind of fulfilling in a strange way. I didn't really like the group structure, though the feat of gaining FA status, or even GA status seemed to require a group effort given the rigorous amount of editing that one has to do. So, I'm not sure how I would approach that problem.

My two favourite novels that we read would have to be The President and The Feast of the Goat, although I did manage to carve out a soft spot in my heart for El Supremo (somehow). I'm also glad that I am now able to freely use the words bias! and magical realism! again without using x's in the words.