Cole Complese provides a great model of one way to use a class blog. Take a look at this post as a good example. The use of the rubric is smart.
One of the things that this highlights for me, though, is that blogs and discussion boards ultimately need to fuse. What you have here is, essentially, the blog being used as a discussion board with each post starting a new topic. Now, frankly, most blog commenting interfaces are pretty weak. But the compensating strength here is the affordances of showing the full text of the professor’s discussion starters in chronological order. I think that provides some coherence for the class. But that’s just a difference in display; there’s no reason that I can think of why the underlying representation in the data model for a blog with commenting needs to be any different than that of a discussion board. I’d like to see a unified tool that enables the professor to choose display and permissions settings based on pedagogical goals. For example, if you kept the blog display (i.e., showing the full text of all starter posts in chronological order) but reversed the permissions, so that any student could post to the main blog level but only the professor could post replies, then you’d have something like a Q&A or FAQ interface.
Michael, I’m intrigued by your idea of giving more control over display to the instructor based on pedagogical goals. This could be very cool.
I’m concerned, though, when I look at Cole’s class blog, that it seems to be just so much “essay posting.” Where’s the back-and-forth of a discussion? Or is discussion not the goal here.
I’m spending a lot of time scratching my head about this whole blog v. discussion board thing. I know there are complimentary uses here, and I know that they might match up to different kinds of goals…
Anyway, I blogged about it after reading your entry, if anyone’s interested.
-Jim
I would say that the fact that Camplese gave the students a grading rubric would indicate that he’s thinking about this more as a short writing assignment than as a discussion. My understanding of Camplese’s situation is that he’s teaching a face-to-face class and enhancing it with web stuff. So he doesn’t need to create long and deep conversations online; he can do that in the classroom. What he’s doing is analogous to asking each student to journal on a topic with the added benefit of making it possible for students to read and respond to each other’s journal entries.
Now, you could do the same thing by giving each student a blog, and that has pros and cons. On the pro side, it liberates each student to dig in deeper and range a little more broadly. On the con side, it creates less immediate opportunity for students to comment on each other’s posts and have a real discussion (though I suspect that blogging proponents would argue that students may be more apt to regularly read, think about, and respond to each other’s blog posts when they are more strongly identified with the voices of the individuals, as blogs do better than discussion boards). My feeling is that a properly designed discussion board is more conducive to long and deep exchanges when used right, but blogs have different strengths. A good class should probably have both.
At any rate, the affordances of the blog versus the discussion board are only part of the problem that leads to this sort of “call and response” pattern of online discussion. The larger problem is time. Online conversation is more time-consuming than face-to-face. Teachers therefore are often forced to choose between cultivating a few deep and long-running conversations over the course of the class and a higher number of shorter, shallower conversations.
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