Have you ever kept a handwritten diary or created a blog? In this section, you are going to learn how to do something similar by creating a journal in Mahara and by writing journal entries. You are not going to publish these journal entries yet, that will come later.
In the past, the journals in Mahara were referred to as blogs, which I am sure many of you are familiar with as a term. It seemed like a good match given that blogs are widely considered to be a form of online diary.
In fact, the word blog derives from the combined words web and log , for example:
web + log = weblog
Think of a log as in:
"Captain's Log, Stardate 43198.7. The Enterprise remains in standard orbit ....".
Whilst this is essentially exactly what the Mahara journal feature is — an online log of your thoughts over time, the term blog has also come to be associated with self-promotion, marketing, and communication.
The term journal fits much better within the world of ePortfolios — it conveys more a sense of thoughtful, reflective self-analysis. Compare the Mahara journal with either a lined-page notepad or a hardback blank-page diary, which you can buy from a stationery store. What you write inside is something you may or may not decide to share with others. That's not to say you wouldn't still want to share journal content with others. You are very much encouraged to do that if you want to.
In Mahara you create either one or a variety of journals (if you have multiple journals enabled in your site settings) and then you use this/these journals as a way of collecting your reflective thought processes on different topics. Actually writing things down is a useful process for helping you to understand your thoughts more clearly than you would understand them otherwise. It obviously helps to use different topics, which can organize your thoughts and learning in a neat and ordered way.
Some people then choose to share these written reflections with others, and Mahara will actually allow you to go public with your journals, if you choose to. Once you have got the hang of it, Mahara actually offers a really easy way of setting up really attractive public journals.
Though, if you are really serious about public blogging, we would still probably advise you to go for a dedicated blogging tool such as WordPress. You could also then go on to use the RSS Feed tool to display WordPress entries in your Mahara pages.
So now that you know that you should be writing in your journal, let's find out how you can do that in Mahara.