Last but not least

It's the last week of our course and tomorrow our blog will be four weeks old :)
I was the first one to post here, and now I start wrapping it up. With our last postings, we all will try to answer two questions:
a) What did we find out about PR in Africa?
b) What did we learn from blogging?

When I think of our first lecture, I remember I was almost speechless and probably rolling my eyes when we were told that during next four weeks our task will be blogging on public relations in Africa. I had no idea how we would be able to do this!!! PR and Africa!!! Now when I look at our blog and my own postings, I am happy to see the result, but at the same time I can also say that the time was far too short to cover all different topics, issues and ideas that I came across while searching for the material. I concentrated on PR in South Africa, and among other things I learned, I consider the approach that one could find traces of PR in the traditions of South Africa that are centuries old to be the most interesting one. 


From the point of view of blogging, I think I learned most from reading the blogs of other groups. I didn't read the blogs just for entertainment (blogs are usually "easy reading" or entertainment for me) but tried to analyze them (being inspired by Kaja who emphasized several times that a message has to be created keeping receiver(s) in mind). Whenever I found something I really liked, I asked myself various questions - why I like it? what makes it special? how it is different from messages that are "normal"?. And I did the same when I saw something that seemed strange or even annoying (later didn't happen often). I think that it has helped me in creating my own messages, and I am also aware that there is still room for improvement :)

Photo from here