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weblogging Q and Answers
Here are the respondents so far, culled for your convenience and gathered in one place, to Laura's Questions for webloggers query for the weekend (in the order in which they emerged):
If you haven't read it on her weblog, here's part of what Laura is doing for her class project: part 2, take 1: Asian parents %@(!#)@ SUCK!!! ... which was about the Asian parents topic which swept through this space a few months ago. You'll see that Laura distilled the 'discussion' extremely well, and framed it in a perspective that makes a lot of sense.
As for me, well here goes. I'm jumbling the question sequence around a bit... hope ya don't mind too much, Ms. Shefler. hehe.
Do your parents know that you have a weblog? Have they ever read it?
Not only my parents know about (and read) my weblog... so do my siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. I initially didn't tell them about the weblog, but as it rapidly evolved into something more general, going beyond AIC/TIC, it was obvious that this was a good way for me to share with them what I was doing with my work with young people in Berkeley (and cyberspace), and with everything else I do outside of that. In fact, I've gotten several relatives to weblog, and look forward to that FAMILY weblogs category there lengthening over time, sooner rather than later. Got lots of kin who happen to be very talented writers :-)
Do they know where to find it?
Yes. My weblog URL is simple to remember--"L" instead of yinzgandantananat or worse, isaythatthemeaningoflifeisandonlyisto *chuckle* ;-)
Do they read it regularly?
I think my mom, dad and brother Peter read my weblog most often--not daily, but regularly enough I guess. Our clan (mom's side) has a forum where many of us regularly go to discuss family-related matters, and I've taken to posting links to weblogs they might find particularly interesting, in that forum.
When you write your weblog, who exactly do you think of as your audience?
This has evolved over time. Initially, I saw my audience as just the students and TAs of the Advanced Internet and regular Internet Classrooms at ATDP last summer. And so, I wrote my weblogs with mostly them in mind. But I did know that, given the medium -- and the fact that a weblog, unlike a website, is a function of time and so it would extend beyond the summer session -- the real (or potential) audience was much larger. But in the beginning, I pictured in my mind an audience of my students, fellow teachers and mentors. This has evolved. Now, I picture my audience as including any caring, thoughtful individuals (a "cloud of witnesses," as I like to say) who would like to know what life is like for young people in that often treacherous journey on their way to adulthood. I see my weblog as a window, or a conduit, for that picture.
A less abstract and more practical answer, though, is this: my immediate audience is everyone on the links on the left -- yes, even the SILENCES -- and they are whom I see in my mind's eye when I write these weblogs.
Of all the weblogs you've ever done, which day is your favorite and why?
I didn't have to think too hard about this, after all. At first, I was inclined to beg off of the question and just answer like Kass did, which makes sense. For her, each weblog is a 'memoir' of a day's events... and so it is, essentially. Yet often enough, weblogs are also about one's thinking and feeling (Bigi and Aaron come to mind here, respectively). I do write about memorable events as well, on any given day, but I tend to take a more literary approach to my writing, and not treat it as just reportage. Another angle that I like to take is an artistic one, in which I use photographic images (which I usually take myself), selecting which ones to use with a text, and sometimes editing that image in Photoshop to highlight a particular feeling or sensation alluded to in the writing.
 Given that, I have to say then that, so far, my favorite weblog has to be the one in which I wrote about meeting up with (at first) Trev, and then some other students in San Francisco, for an afternoon of just hanging out, and then attending a book reading by Philip Pullman. I titled the weblog for that day: heaven and hell in the city of st. francis.
I like that weblog because I think I was able to capture for myself the intensity and emotion of that day, one aspect of which (hell) was completely surprising and unexpected. (Come to think of it, heaven was, too!) I like that weblog for the images I used in it, which were all serendipitous in their own ways. I like it because I was able to throw in some lines of raw poetry, and it was all a genuine reflection of how that day felt like, to me. It is an open question, of course, whether that was conveyed, or whether weblog readers saw and felt what I did, through my writing and images. And I like it because it led directly to an unforgettable (to me) weblog I wrote a week later, how many subtle knives are in this weblog?
Lastly, I like that weblog because that one, out of all the ones I've written, definitively made clear to me that I had found a medium in which I could break the bonds of the formal essay structure, and bring a certain poesy and informality to prose that I couldn't otherwise do, were I writing a traditional essay. Of course I didn't realize it then, when I was writing that weblog, but when I look back on my weblog writing these last six months, I can see how this medium has given me a kind of freedom in writing that I've never felt before. Which leads directly to the last question...
Has your life changed in any way (internally or externally) as a result of weblogging?
Definitely.
As I've mentioned more than once in past weblogs, I had been looking for a while for the perfect tool to use in my Internet Classrooms at ATDP, a tool which would serve the dual purpose of (a) keeping a learning community going past the summer, and (b) enabling me to share my love of writing and reading with young people. And as it turns out, weblogging has accomplished much more than that, for me.
When Catherine, Chris and Raymond walked in to the ATDP Director's office one morning late last spring, and showed Nina and me that one tool that they were using for the Interactive University, I instantly realized that here was the tool AND the medium I had been searching for all these years. It didn't take long at all for them to convince me that Manila had great potential in an educational situation. Little did they realize that my brain was running at mach speed at those very moments, as I saw the vast and deep possibilities for weblogging, for my students and mentees at ATDP, and for myself.
This weblog itself -- not just this entry, but the accumulated/ing weblogs of the past and the future -- is going to be an account of that. A story of how this space, this worldwide web, can be made a transformative medium, giving real power and substance to anyone who has a story to tell, a life to share. And I am convinced it will work, for the simple reason that my weblog does not exist in a vacuum. It is merely one link (albeit at times a focal point) in the round of weblogs that have sprouted up as a result of those first inspirations late last spring.
With the force and impetus of this collective weblogging community of young people and old, teenagers and adults, the wonder I derive at all of us moving forward in a rush of writing the moments, events, epiphanies, banalities, images, poetry, laughter, anger, joy, sadness, elation, fear, all the rampant humanity of the stuff inside each one of us... the wonder is limitless.
So yes, you can say that I have been transformed by weblogging.
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