Evaluation

Evaluation of Blog

I instantly new that I wanted ‘temples’ to be the topic of my blog due to my personal interest in them and the fact that I knew I would be visiting many during my time here. I also realised how many different aspects to temple culture there were that could be covered, in turn giving it a more varied and therefore interesting approach. The things that I planned to cover were mainly things that I genuinely wanted to learn more about anyways. However, when it came to living in Taiwan and experiencing the differences between Western and Taiwanese culture, I was forced to question things I saw that I did not understand which sparked more post ideas. This kept it interesting for me and I believe also presented me with a more detailed set of topics that range from the small and personal such as the meaning of incense smoke to the fairly broad.

When looking closer at the reasons as to why my blog did not turn out entirely the way I wanted it to, I realised that the most crucial factor was ethics.
Ethically, I felt uncomfortable interrupting peoples prayer and so I was unable to get as intimate photographs and film shots as would like or ask people as many questions about their religious practises and their choices of temple. In general it was hard to research as to whether it is rude or not to ask about someones personal religious practises. When trying to work around that by getting my room mates to answer questionnaires, I could see that they were uncomfortable answering particular questions and one of them declined altogether.

If I could have made the perfect blog, I would have featured more interviews with people of different ages and beliefs to help give a more well rounded view of the lifestyle that requires a country to have such a wealth of incredible temples. To get around this, I also tried to add in personal experiences such as my post about when I was taught how to pray properly in the temple of Enlightenement at Lotus Lake. I enjoyed this and it was a memorable experience, I also now understand why there are some very specific ways of doing certain parts of the prayer ritual.

The language barrier, as expected was tricky to get around. It meant that I couldn’t just go and ask someone to explain what something meant or why it was in a particular place. A lot of what I have learnt and written in blog posts is just from personal experience and understanding, backed up by a lot of Google research. Although I thoroughly enjoyed writing the blog, I found it hard to stop it from just being regurgetation of something I had read on another website or in a book.This is something that I think lead to my blog not being as individual and interesting as it could have been. However, to try and test the reliability of the information retrieved from websites, I tried to find the same information in a book or other document. The material that I found particularly useful or that goes more indepth than my posts, I have featured on a seperate page on my blog.
Generally though, when it comes to variations of religious practises and information based on folklore in a country and continent where many different languages are spoken, there will always be the odd variation.

Personally, I would have liked to have made a series of a few short one or two minute long films about different temples I have visited and facts or stories learnt. However, as I mentioned earlier, I did not feel comfortable filming around many of the temples and it seemed slightly disrespectful and had I begun filming, I did not know what boundaries there were when it came to filming people praying and showing images of statues and personal things like offerings. I did subtly over my time manage to take the odd few second shots here and there and my intention was to have a short two minute video montage of all of the different temples I had visited in Taiwan as my final post. Unfortunately, my laptop broke a week before the deadline and was not able to be fixed in Taiwan. Although jumping on one of the twenty or so public computers in the library whenever I could to make up for this, they have no software on them for editing and I could not access all of my footage as not all of it is backed up on my hard drive. This was a disappointment and something I would prepare for much better next time. It also meant that I could not work whenever I wanted to, due to there being a small amount of computers to share between such a large population of students on campus.

Generally though, I am very happy with the actual contents of my blog. I believe I kept it engaging by posting information about a variety temple features and the culture surrounding them. I included personal thoughts, factual information and folklore so it wasn’t boring. Purposefully I veered away from doing only ‘show and tell’ posts where I told the reader about each temple I visited and showed photographs of it as I believe this would get monotonous and lose the readers attention quickly. It also wouldn’t serve as much of a purpose. I wanted each post to mean something and to add to the bigger picture surrounding Taiwan’s temples.

By adding the odd directions of how to get to particular locations and recommending some links to websites, blogs and books that had helped me in my research, I hope to inspire and help fellow travellers around Taiwan – after all it is a blog and not an essay.

Overall, I am proud of my blog. I believe the content is interesting, useful and varied. I would have liked to have featured more interviews and documentary film style aspects but this is something that can still be worked on as a personal project. The main things that got in the way of me achieveing this, I do believe are things that I could not have really changed. Aesthetically, I could have made the layout more eye catching and immersive and would pay more attention to such details in the future.

The blog has definitely had an impact on my personal experience of understanding a culture I was so new. My time here has been enriched by being forced to question different aspects of my surroundings and to understand theTaiwanese way of life from different and more indepth view points.