Well, I did nothing today other than sit at my desk and play video games. Quite productive, actually. I nearly conquered the world (again). I hate being in limbo like this, not having a job, and not really knowing where to go other than wait for the classifieds in the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But I’m reading Anne’s blog, and she encourages me. In fact, her blog got me started blogging.
Now would be a good time to do a reflexive blog: a blog about blogging. Blogs are merely webpages with dated entries. There are three basic types of blogs: blogs-as-cool-links (Daily Illuminator), blogs-as-links-to-news-stories (ScienceDaily), and blogs-as-online-journals. I’d followed the first two types of blogs for several years before I ran across “Anne . . . straight from the hip.” It was the blog that introduced the blog-journal to me.
The blog-journal solved two different problems I had been ruminating over for some time. The first was for a teaching forum. As an English teacher, this was the direction I’ve been moving for a while. Since the only real way to learn to write involves writing regularly, I’ve always had my students keep some form of journal. In the beginning, it was a physical, written notebook. The first time I took up all 50 notebooks and carried them home to read and grade, though, I decided there had to be an easier way.
A different semester, I decided to have my students email me their journal entries. This worked much better – students generally typed faster than they could write longhand, I could read them quickly and reply with my comments interspersed throughout their writing without crowding it into the margin, I didn’t have to worry about penmanship, and I didn’t have to carry around and keep track of several piles of spiral-bound tree pulp.
But still, there were problems. Some mail programs inserted HTML code that my email client couldn’t display normally; also, all the emails cluttered my hard drive. I began to toy with the idea of having the students post them on the web somehow, and then read and comment on each others’ entries. I wasn’t sure how to go about it, though – standard message boards just didn’t seem to fit.
The second problem the blog-journal solved was that of a personal journal. My father is a great journaller – he’s kept regular journals for about 40 years now. He writes them all in cursive with a fountain pen in hardbound ledgers. He’s encouraged me a number of times to journal, and several times I’ve tried, but it’s always petered out. I kept it going the longest when I used my laptop – its portability, combined with the ease of typing, made journalling less of a chore than ever before. But I still lacked motivation to continue for an extended period.
The blog-journal looked like a great way to keep my personal journal, while giving all my scattered friends and relatives a quick-access point to get news about my life, as well as an easy way to interact with me by commenting on my entries. Along the way, I would be trailblazing for my (future) students, dealing with typical problems and working the kinks out of the system before I made blogging an assignment.
There are two more central elements in my desire to blog, though. The first is to learn to write. One reason my early attempts at journalling failed was that I always wrote about the wrong things. Food I ate, TV shows I watched, etc. Stuff few people care about even as it happens, much less on down the road. It takes a while to learn to recognize, “This event that happened or this person I met is something/someone I will want to remember down the road.” Moreover, as I said before, the only real way to learn to write is to write regularly – and 500 words a day as a goal is a good starting point.
The second element is Socrates’ statement that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” To carry the idea further, the unexamined thought is not worth thinking. When I was very young, when other kids had “bedtime stories,” I had my dad give me a recap of my day. He’d tell me everything I did, hitting all the important points, and finally winding up with the present: me, about to be put to bed. I hope this blog will give me a way to actively reflect on the events and people in my life, as well as an outlet to “think out loud” about the books I read and thoughts I think, and so to . . . well, as Aristotle put it in Poetics, “complete myself.”
Now would be a good time to do a reflexive blog: a blog about blogging. Blogs are merely webpages with dated entries. There are three basic types of blogs: blogs-as-cool-links (Daily Illuminator), blogs-as-links-to-news-stories (ScienceDaily), and blogs-as-online-journals. I’d followed the first two types of blogs for several years before I ran across “Anne . . . straight from the hip.” It was the blog that introduced the blog-journal to me.
The blog-journal solved two different problems I had been ruminating over for some time. The first was for a teaching forum. As an English teacher, this was the direction I’ve been moving for a while. Since the only real way to learn to write involves writing regularly, I’ve always had my students keep some form of journal. In the beginning, it was a physical, written notebook. The first time I took up all 50 notebooks and carried them home to read and grade, though, I decided there had to be an easier way.
A different semester, I decided to have my students email me their journal entries. This worked much better – students generally typed faster than they could write longhand, I could read them quickly and reply with my comments interspersed throughout their writing without crowding it into the margin, I didn’t have to worry about penmanship, and I didn’t have to carry around and keep track of several piles of spiral-bound tree pulp.
But still, there were problems. Some mail programs inserted HTML code that my email client couldn’t display normally; also, all the emails cluttered my hard drive. I began to toy with the idea of having the students post them on the web somehow, and then read and comment on each others’ entries. I wasn’t sure how to go about it, though – standard message boards just didn’t seem to fit.
The second problem the blog-journal solved was that of a personal journal. My father is a great journaller – he’s kept regular journals for about 40 years now. He writes them all in cursive with a fountain pen in hardbound ledgers. He’s encouraged me a number of times to journal, and several times I’ve tried, but it’s always petered out. I kept it going the longest when I used my laptop – its portability, combined with the ease of typing, made journalling less of a chore than ever before. But I still lacked motivation to continue for an extended period.
The blog-journal looked like a great way to keep my personal journal, while giving all my scattered friends and relatives a quick-access point to get news about my life, as well as an easy way to interact with me by commenting on my entries. Along the way, I would be trailblazing for my (future) students, dealing with typical problems and working the kinks out of the system before I made blogging an assignment.
There are two more central elements in my desire to blog, though. The first is to learn to write. One reason my early attempts at journalling failed was that I always wrote about the wrong things. Food I ate, TV shows I watched, etc. Stuff few people care about even as it happens, much less on down the road. It takes a while to learn to recognize, “This event that happened or this person I met is something/someone I will want to remember down the road.” Moreover, as I said before, the only real way to learn to write is to write regularly – and 500 words a day as a goal is a good starting point.
The second element is Socrates’ statement that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” To carry the idea further, the unexamined thought is not worth thinking. When I was very young, when other kids had “bedtime stories,” I had my dad give me a recap of my day. He’d tell me everything I did, hitting all the important points, and finally winding up with the present: me, about to be put to bed. I hope this blog will give me a way to actively reflect on the events and people in my life, as well as an outlet to “think out loud” about the books I read and thoughts I think, and so to . . . well, as Aristotle put it in Poetics, “complete myself.”
posted by Mark at 1/06/2004 10:15:00 PM
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