John W. Cochran Jr.

University of Michigan - Flint

Last Post –
Where Do We Go From Here?

Post Posterous Thoughts

Post, post, post; 2 posts, 5 tweets and 3 comments seemed to be the weekly
rhythm throughout this semester. Seemed like an impossible challenge when first
announced. With a bit of effort and lack of procrastination, it seems that most,
including myself were able to keep up quite nicely. Posterous has been a useful tool
and allowed for a great way to keep our documents well organized, easy to locate
and easy to make comments on. I do not believe that the twitter portion of the tools
we used for this class was as useful as Posterous. Twitter seemed to have some use
as a notification tool, but given the restrictions on the amount of content that can
be in each tweet, the tool for me just lacked any real use.

What Next?
Often as students we tend to think of course work as an ends to a means to
graduation. This can be especially true for coursework unrelated to our majors or as
a requirement for another course. Following the completion of some courses
students are often left with a feeling of frustration over a lack of learning or an
overwhelming feeling that they have just completely wasted their time over the
past four months. As a fairly optimistic person, I tend to believe that even in the
worst of situations that a person has the opportunity to take something away from
the experience. Fortunately this course for me was not a negative learning
experience, but instead a very favorable one.

When trying to determine my “take aways” following my courses, I like to think

through at least 1 or 2 things that I was really impacted by from the class. I try to
think in terms of, “what is my lifelong learning from the course”. For example, in my
philosophy course, which was horrible and the instructor was very difficult, I still
managed to learn how to write very concisely when necessary. For this course, I
believe the lifelong learning I will take away, is to write often, even if it is just a
post, a blog, or even a personal journal.

Commitment to Writing
A lifelong learning is not much without a commitment to using it. I am going to
personally commit to keeping a journal and writing at least at the beginning and
ending of every day. It will be a lot easier for me to stay committed to this, if I use
technology to keep up with the task. I do not seem to write as well when writing
with a pen. So using a computer is probably a good way for me to go. I would like to
post some of my writing, but would also like the freedom to have some of the
thoughts and writings to remain private. If any of you knows a good format for this, I
would appreciate your input.

My second commitment is to write a book. I have always wanted to do this and I

understand that there are many tools available for getting a book published. Given
my background in financial services and the recent collapse of our economy, a book
on surviving this economic climate and recovering from economic hardships would
be a great book to write. I just hope I can get organized and stay committed and on
track to writing it prior to the economy recovering.

I could really use some help in putting a plan together to accomplish this goal. So if
anyone knows of a good web site on writing books and getting them published, or
knows anyone that has written a book before, I would love the help.