Reply to comment

I feel that public online personal journals are often written because of the widespread draw to public exposure in a private way (it's important to note that people certainly have many reasons for personal journals, and I am not covering all here). Someone can write a public journal under a made-up screen name (puppetry, anyone?). While publishing an academic paper in a printed journal is public exposure, I think it's very different because it is about the ideas, not the author. The very purpose of a personal journal is to showcase one's life and interests, while maybe going through some personal reflection. An academic paper is usually not about one’s life; it’s about the research and conclusions from scholarly work. An audience may draw conclusions about the author of a paper after reading it, yet the level of judgment is much lower than that of an audience reading a public personal journal. This is a stark contrast from a personal journal.

I find the requirement to post online in a public forum useful because it forces us to acknowledge the “outside” world, outside the college bubble.  Even though we rarely see posts from people outside the class, just knowing that anyone can see it provides an audience very different than the one students usually think about (the professor and/or the rest of the class). I think it’s a requirement in this class because Anne wants us to think about presenting our ideas to an audience that may not be looking to hear them, perhaps to someone who stumbles upon Serendipity by a Google search. I wonder where it falls in the magic Google algorithm. How feminist is an search engine algorithm?