Learning Essay

Since the first day of spring quarter, I knew that this class was going to be a lot of work. It seemed unreal the things that we would cover in only ten classes. After completing the personal hypertext about some aspect of our life I was comfortable publishing my websites, the changes I would make, and the things I would add to make it better. I choose to do my personal hypertext as a sort of dedication to the author, Jack Kerouac, and after being very creatively stuck for most of the quarter, I found that I could not only connect Kerouac to my final site, but also the beat generation and how they shaped Buddhism in America.

The technicalities of publishing proved to have its difficulties, but once I got the hang of dream weaver I was able to really pull together a site of which I am really proud. The layout of the site initially took some time, but after getting the basic back bone and outline, I was able to go full force into the academic part of the project. By originally doing my personal hypertext on Jack Kerouac, my final project allowed me to incorporate more information about the beat generation and Buddhism. The study of Buddhism, its precepts, and the beat generation is of my main interests both in academia and in my personal life, so by having the ability to tie these two aspects together gave me great satisfaction and motivation to make this site look great.

As the web master I decided to lay out my site by having both internal and external links. The external links are identified with stars and they provide more information about the topics on my site, the links also go to photo galleries, and museum/info websites. The internal links are found throughout the website and take you to various pages that can also be linked to by the left side column. In the schoolwork splash page, the left link bar does not have the same links as the one in my Interest splash page, but all the internal links on the school work page within the text link back to the pages from my interests. I thought that doing this organizationally gave the my site the best way of navigating and also by designing it this way keeps the reader interested. These links include information about Zen Lunatics, American Buddhism, the foundations of Buddhism, The beat generation, and my testimony on my "dharma Bum life." I also included questions like is Zen Lunacy American Buddhism? The reader is able to click which brings them to a new page about that topic. I choose to do it this way becuase I felt like it having questions keeps the reader asking, wondering, and reading.

What made this assignment meaningful for me was the fact that I could include my own experience and my own understanding and make a contribution to knowledge. There has been very little scholarship about the direction Buddhism is taking in America so by mixing my two favorite fields, literature and Buddhism, I was able to really explore this topic in detail making my own observations as an American Buddhist and as beatnik enthusiasts. I think that the multimedia part of my final, located on the schoolwork splash page is probably one of the most appeal things about my site. Whoever watches the video would be inclined to spend more time on the site to explore not only what Buddhism has to offer as a practice, but to find out who these Beatniks (that I believe greatly influenced Buddhism) were.

Making the movie also had its difficulties, but seeing the finished project up on you tube made all the work worthwhile. I feel like throughout the quarter I have learned a lot about the time you have to invest to publish a really good website. Also I learned that there are aspects about the website, like multimedia, design, and navigation which make the pages more appealing to the audience and make visitors want to read on. I think that it was also very important that we were asked to "contribute to knowledge" because after doing a lot of research I realized that this is not really any scholarship that follows the same idea I have. I think that that is very important because it makes us as students think critically about a topic that we may be interested in, not to mention if there are already ten sites dedicated to the beat movement’s involvement in American Buddhism then my site would be maybe helpful or maybe even useless to its audience. By publishing my site about the shape Buddhism is taking within relation to beat generation, I was able to create something that is unheard of when you type that phrase into google. Knowing that makes me proud of the work I was able to accomplish and share with the online community.

As the quarter comes to a close, I think that I will look at this difficult experience as a beneficial one, not only for the knowledge I contributed, but for the final project that just sort of came to be. It took a lot of work, but it all seemed somehow to just work together perfectly, and I am very happy with the outcome. I learned more about the beats than I thought was even possible and I was really able to shed my own light on Buddhist practice in America from my own experience. Overall I really enjoyed the time I spent working on this because it was something I am very interested in and although it was tedious, the final website as a whole is a huge accomplishment for my academic endeavors this quarter and I will continue to show off my site to family and friends… and potentially make another one about my travels as a "dharma bum" as I head of to Peru and Ireland for my studies abroad.