These journals that we keep here have several purposes. For Amanda and
Kyle, they serve mostly as daily practice in certain elements of good
writing, and not just spelling, grammar, and punctuation; they're
learning something, I hope, about the value of regular habits, and maybe
a little about how to choose topics, frame thoughts, collect ideas, etc.
For me, they are a more technical learning experience. I wanted to see
how something like this could be automated, but the way we are doing it
is still a little creaky. Every time the kids sit down to write, for
example, they load all of their entries up in a word-processing
document window. That's a distraction, and creates some danger that
previous entries will be lost. I was looking around this morning for a
better alternative. It looks like there are several online weblog
services that might do this kind of thing better for technically-minded
grownups:
But would these things work for kids, or for grownups who are just now
learning to deal with e-mail? It seems to me that the ideal service of
this kind would let you update a weblog by sending e-mail to it in some
way.
