Overall, the schema figure we create helped guide me in my writing process. In the case of our genre of Edutainment blogging, we made sure to make the schema flexible, so it could fit the format of different types of blogs we looked at. I feel like the schema did help give me a guide on where I should put different thoughts I had and wanted to explain. I feel like if I didn’t have the schema, my explanation would have been more scattered and less intuitive, but with the schema I feel like it flows and seems more of a natural progression.
From a technical perspective, XML is a new type of markup language to me, and so there was a small learning curve. The most difficult part was using Oxygen to write the content of my blog post. It has really useful autocomplete features and auto formatting, but I ended up making the decision to write the blog post in a word processor I was comfortable with, with the schema in mind, and then adding the tags in Oxygen.
For building the schema, I definitely thought the group work was critical. It was useful to individually research blogs, and then see other group members opinions on blogs they looked at. Discussing which aspects of the blogs to add to the schema and where to put different tags was useful in creating a flexible, but accurate structure we could use for the project. In the end, I think we did a good job in building a final schema. Looking at our groups blog posts, you can clearly make out vague structural components, but you can also recognize our individual styles in the individual composition. This is something we observed while researching different blogs, and we tried to preserve this feature while building our schema.
