Instead of a single post I would like to use my responses to other people’s posts.
Alex’s “Shifting economies of a digital age” and Michael DeLaGarza’s “Unit 3 The New Second World.” Both for the same reasons. They were interesting conversations that touched on things we talked about in class and things the class made us think about more generally.

I liked the format overall and the conversational nature of the posts. The readings and videos were excellent and I enjoyed reading other peoples webpages. One thing that would have helped me would be more direct comparisons between two (or more) countries. The China/India comparison helped give me a point of reference to look at the big ideas. Maybe have students make one post about how a unit relates to a specific country. I really enjoyed the big picture nature of this class and the things it made me question.

The most important thing I learned this semester is that its impossible to actually compare economic systems because of the effects of culture. Even two countries that are both capitalist, or socialist or whatever have very different economies. In part because they have different human and natural resources but primarily due to culture. I used to think of economics as very cold, mathematical and somewhat arcane, but now I think about it differently. It has really made me think about why we end up with the economy we have and what would have to change to change the economy. I used to put the blame for our economic situation on politicians and CEOs but im starting to think of how I need to change if I want the country to.

I think I’ve learned more from this Economics class than any others I’ve taken. While those seem to be just reading out of a book, and giving historic examples, this seemed to require us to look at current issues, and the readings seemed much more relevant than those out of a standard economics textbook. I think the most valuable thing I learned was at the beginning, the differences between systems and how they’re effecting the future between nations. I also enjoyed learning how these up and coming developing countries are modernizing, seems we’ll have to work harder to keep up with or stay ahead of them.

I like the blog post style used for this course. I think it’s a lot easier to keep track of my own work. For example, I can go to my page and see what/how many posts I’ve made for each unit while for my other class that has the basic d2l set up, I’d have to go to the discussion question, and scroll through to ensure that I had already answered, and posted two replies for that unit. This was is more convenient for sure. The only thing I wasn’t necessarily a fan of was the scheduling. I found the relaxed due dates caused me to lose motivation and procrastinate more than I should have. Of course, this is simply a personal opinion on it, I’m sure some students loved the relaxed deadlines. One thing I think that would be helpful is to have assignments where we need to poke around the entire site more than just posting from the home page. More assignments requiring actual pages, than simple posts perhaps.

I think that my 3 best posts this semester were:

Trust The Poor?

• I chose this one because I was able to intertwine personal experience with the information in the reading to give real world examples of my standing on the issue.

Educate Yourself on your Insurance

• I picked this one because again I was able to speak somewhat of personal experience while talking about the readings and discussing issues we have with insurance, as I work in the insurance field.

Bad Governance
-This one I picked because I think its the post I felt most personally about, my most thoughtful post.