Tag: edublogs

Here’s a great post on student blogging from Middlebury College professor Barbara Ganley’s bgblogging (which I just added to my blogroll).

Here’s an excerpt:

In the 1970s and 80s, following the lead of Peter Elbow and Donald Graves, among others, we focussed on process–how to get ideas stirring and on the paper, how to infuse the process with energy and excitement. This kind of writing instruction is now limiting–we have to move beyond this now codified approach. Of course, detractors think that blogging embraces the messiness, the anything-goes-mentality, the very worst of the writing-process; and on first view, student blogging can be extremely undisciplined and informal, dynamically unruly in its humor and irreverence, its disregard for rules and conventions. Yup, this work unsettles just about everyone–still–teachers, administrators, parents and even the students themselves. We hand over the reins of our courses in large part to the students themselves. At least, this is my approach. And sometimes our students write downright incoherent entries due to a lack of simple copyediting , (take this recent one on my artswriting blog, for example). What do we do? Do we jump in and correct the mistakes, clean it up before the world sees and judges? Or do we wait to see what the class will say or do? Will anyone notice? Will anyone care? And if they don’t?

(more…)

Sabine is a former colleague and a smart cookie. I’m pleased to see that she has started a blog. Add this one to your RSS reader.

Aaron Campbell at Ryukoku University has a great piece out on how to use LiveJournal to teach EFL. It has everything you’d want in this sort of an article, including a rationale for choosing the particular technology and step-by-step instructions for educators. This is one of the clearest, most concrete examples I’ve seen for using blogs in a class.

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.