Happy Chinese New Year (Ox) to all!

When I called my family in China yesterday near noon, there was such a big noise of fireworks over Skype that both sides needed to shout in order to complete the conversation. While in China I had little favor in fireworks, the noise over the phone still brought happy memories of the new year to me. I miss the time of the whole family sitting up the night (Shou3 Sui4), eating all kinds of good foods till you are stuffed, dressing up in new clothes and shoes, and getting Hong2 Bao1 from adults...so much fun that my son Jerry probably would no longer experience if staying with me.

Newly elected President Obama is an Ox! This would be a very special year for him.

Welcome to my Blog!

This is not my first, but I hope it would be my last and a long living Blog. I demonstrated how to create blogs in Blogger several times when teaching EDCI270, but never used them for real. As a beginner I can't help wondering: What motivate us (busy graduate students) create and maintain a Blog? If it is not required, would people still like to start a blog? for what reason? how often they update it? how long will it exist?

The title of my blog implies that this blog is designated to the course, not for something else. So for those veteran bloggers, do they publish everything on the same place or they use different blogs for different purposes (like Johannes mentioned in class, they may use one blog for family and friends, one for career, etc.)? Personally I would like to keep at least two spaces separately, one for myself, and another for public. So my questions are: how do we choose what to publish on Blogs? How much would we like to share with each others? They seem to be related to some other questions we touched in the first class: friendships and relationships, trust and reputation, identity of self and community...

Just a few lines of thoughts, although I knew (from teaching270) that a "real" blog should have some links to provide some sort of answers or promote deeper understanding.