The suggestion on blogsperiment that students should be encouraged to create blogs that transcend individual courses fits well with the idea in my last post about approaching the web-enhancing of a university on the departmental level rather than on a course-by-course basis. However, unlike the other idea, this one can be done without a large commitment from the department (although that certainly would help). Give the students blogs, encourage individual instructors to give blogging assignments, assign a category or shibboleth tag for each course, and add a per-course aggregator. Here’s what you get from it:
- Students can use their own blogs for per-course blogging assignments.
- The per-course blog posts can be sucked into the course enviroment without a lot of manual fiddling or filtering.
- Each student’s blog becomes essentially a portfolio of course contributions over the lifetime of his/her undergraduate career.
- Because the the posts are permanently archived, students can more easily reflect back on previous courses and their relationships to new ones. They can even rejigger their categories as they gain broader and deeper perspectives on what they are learning.
These are just a few of the benefits; the original blogsperiment post offers more and is well worth reading.
