Blogging in the Classroom

This is my first time using blog style writing in a class, and I have to say I really like it.  It is a totally new way to interact with classmates.  The writing process makes me define and analyze my ideas and attitudes, and then the public nature of posting lets me read other peoples’ ideas about the subject, which then in turn helps me to adjust or even change my ideas of what I think is important as a teacher.  One example is my posting about how I would structure an IRW class.  After writing and posting my thoughts, and reading others (and going to class, and doing the reading) I realized that my attitudes towards the class were very objectivist and product oriented.  I think there is some value to those points of view, but I came to this program to learn new ways of teaching and thinking about teaching.  So this exercise helped me to analyze, critique and even change the way I think about teaching.  It’s very useful.

As a reader, a “good” posting is one that is well written.

Sorry, that was my attempt at humor.  But it’s kind of true.  I like to read posts that have specific details related to the prompt, whether those are personal, academic or professional.  If a post is too general or vague, it is not interesting to read, and more importantly to me, it’s not helpful to me to in my process of defining my own ideas.  For me, the most interesting and useful blog postings talk about a topic in a way I’ve never thought of.  It’s a great way to learn and evaluate new ideas.

I don’t really read blogs on the internet, because most of the ones I’ve seen are political and those just tend to recycle the same stupid talking points of whatever party the blogger supports.  If any of you know of an interesting blog and would like to share it, please post in in the comments.

The paragraph above is another great example of why blogging (“new media”) is great: it’s much more interactive.  In general, I would like our blog postings to be more interactive.  I’d like more of us to post comments and continue our conversations.

I guess since we have only 15 people in our class, it is not too much of a burden to read everyone’s posting.  The problem might be responses, though.  Ideally, we should give some kind of response for each posting, but 15 might be too much.  We could deal with responses the way we are doing it this week, which is, “post a few comments.”  The only problem with this is that some people might get a lot of comments, and others might not.  I have noticed in myself how happy I am when someone chooses to comment on my posting.  Maybe by doing the “post a few comments” assignment, people will try to make their posts more interesting?  Or would it contribute to writer’s block?

Breaking into smaller groups might be the answer, maybe groups of five.  I’d like to mix up the groups throughout the semester, though, so that I can get to know and trade ideas with everyone in the class.  Personally, I might continue to read blogs of people in other groups, though.

Blech, evaluation and grading.  I am teaching an advanced ESL writing course, which is supposedly similar to a “basic skills” course, except targeted to ESL students instead of "remedial" students.  This class, and Eng 700, have inspired me to start assigning “blogs” for that class instead of journals on the college's version of iLearn.  I will require students to read and respond to their classmates’ postings, but I think for that class I am going to just require that the students do them, and check them off once they are done.  There are two reasons for this: first, that is how I usually deal with journals, and second, this is an experiment.  I’m not sure how it will work out for us in that class, so I don’t want to weight the grading too heavily.

In this class, we don’t want our classmates to rate our postings, and to tell the truth I don’t really want Mark to grade my postings.  Once that starts, I will feel much more pressure in writing and will not feel comfortable exploring and experimenting.  If I were in Mark’s shoes, I would just require that the blogs be done, and depend on the other two parts of the course to define a student’s grade.  However, as the instructor, when writing the syllabus, I might lower the weight of the blogs in the calculation of the final grade.

Yes, the more I think about it, the more I think that evaluating blog postings would be counter productive.