The most illuminating parts of my research project were understanding what a subculture is and what subcultures do. I had no idea that there were actual websites online that had people living a different live inside them. Inside subcultures you can be anyone you want to be. The people who were part of mugglenet.com definately lived up to this. They had a love for Harry Potter and lived in their muggle world and their world of Harry Potter. It was interesting to me that there are so many different subcultures online and that more people are a part of them than I had realized.
The most frustrating was finding all the information through the website. Honestly this class was extremely frustrating to me. The book was hard to understand so therefore the concepts were hard to understand. I tried coming to class reguarly at the beginning of the semester but honestly things were never explained clearly and I felt that it was a waste of time considering I felt that I could teach myself the course concepts better than the book or instructor was teaching the course concepts. I am sad because I thought this class was going to be interesting, but instead it was a huge let down. At the beginning of the semester we would spend the first half hour of class going over just how to USE the blog, when we could have been going over more popular culture concepts. The idea of the blog may not be a bad one, but what I do not understand is why you do not just use blackboard's discussion board. This way you can have blogs on there and also be able to see every persons responses to others. Basically, you made us spend a ton of time blogging and responding, instead of actually teaching us the concepts of popular culture. It was not my job to tell you who I responded to, technically that is your job to find. You are the one who made is so difficult on yourself to figure when people were blogging and who they were responding to, when you could have just let us use blackboard and you could have found the responses easily yourself and they wouldn't have been tampered with by other students deleting them, or just not understanding how to post the blogs accurately. We would spend so much time talking about gaming, porn, or other absurd things in class that is discusted me. Really, could we have just had notes and some structure to the class? There was absolutely no real structure or plan for what was going on in our class.
