Teaching Journal #1

Blogs, Journals & Diaries

Blogs are, pretty much, journals in cyberspace. Yet they so often become about Politics, or Health & Lifetsyle, or Art, or Media, or lots of other things. This is wonderful of course. But at this point your Blog/Journal is more Journal-ism than it is Dear Diary.

Journal-ISM vs Journal-ING

Yet a journal remains a way to note questions, failures, successes, and other events, experiences, and emotions as your process unfolds. It doesn’t necessarily need to be public, it could be private. I suppose it could even be on paper. Now that I think about it, perhaps most blogs lean toward journalism rather than journaling. When you write about politics, health & lifestyle, etc, you’re a sort of journalist writing for an audience who’s interested in your topic. But in a journal, a diary, the POV is more for yourself. Maybe it’s a paper book under your pillow to be read by pretty much no one. Maybe it’s in the cloud accessible by anyone with an internet connection, but either way, you’re not so much selling a message like

let me tell you why Hilary Clinton is a crook and only Donald Trump can save America

As you are making “lab notes”

this semester I’ve had the class use Twitter. I’ve heard amazing results in other educational settings. For us: fail.

Maybe there’s not that much difference. But my hope in launching this new series here on BeachArts is to document how my many educational experiments and experiences are going. Memories are so often colored more positively, or more negatively, over time. Perhaps this can be a place of sorta raw notes I can look back on occasionally, and see how things have evolved.