Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

It's funny. Even though I mentioned in the student accessible version that I wouldn't treat this day for posting as anything special, for here it still is, setting the record of two thousand plus entries in both journals in five years.

I would like to look back today on my decision to make a second online chronicle, given that this one is about the sometimes uninspiring things that students do, and the measures (trade secrets, if you will) that I sometimes employ to push them.

It was also around that time that my co-teachers were starting to discover the power of the internet for posting one's own content, and using it in their own classes, such as Communications Mediated by Computers, requiring the students to get out there on the bandwidth and make a virtual mark.

Now, I understand the pressure that even a hobby can become tedious when it is suddenly required, either by work or school.

But the point about electronic expression, as I would like to call it, is that you can talk about anything you like, and there will most certainly be some people in the web wide world who will agree with you, after they find you or you reach out to them.

Of course the converse is also true, and the anonymity and remoteness of the medium will give them strength to voice their contrary opinions to you, but in time you will learn to accept that that distance works both ways, and that they are too far away and the net is too large for them to really hurt you unless you let them and eventually they will move on to a target who likes to react the way they want them to.

So I started the second journal to demonstrate regular postings to the students, about anything in the world, including personal stuff.

And that is an achievement I'm proud of, having been consistent in writing what the students believe to be one page a day, but is actually two pages, as I write about them too.

Session 2001 continues on this virtual space odyssey. Class dismissed.