Blogging in the Classroom
From Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom :
Talk about mixed emotions…a seemingly great list of 13 blogging articles from Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing with no time to read them all.
My friend, Trevor, pointed me in the direction of the call for papers for this issue of Lore several months ago, and I had meant to submit something, but with the wedding and my busy life, I let it slip on by. Also, as last semester was my first attempt to incorporate blogging into my teaching, I don’t think I had very much perspective built up yet. Last semester, the class blog was more a shared writing journal, information space, and place where a few of the students relayed their frustrations with the class, than a fully functional and thriving with participation blog.
Several of the concluding excerpts from the issue sound very familiar to me, especially the following:
Of course, my blog contains many entries that are not about my academic work. What regular reader can forget my scintillating accounts of backing up my computer or trying to fix the broken toilet? Sometimes I do bring those moments into the classroom, usually in the before-class banter of what happened last weekend. Furthermore, much of that mundane stuff is in here because there are multiple audiences for this, including friends I’ve had for decades who also blog. No one in my family blogs, as far as I know, but that could change any day now.
I think I should probably talk more actively about blogs, my blog, and have more computer classroom sessions to help better take advantage of blogs in the classroom. I’m currently in this Spring semester’s pre-planning phase, and have already built a new class blog with a new focus. Everything is much more bare-bones, focused on the text, which I think is important, considering the course is a writing course. Also, I’ve made it a general English 120 blog, which I can reuse and which can evolve over future semesters, and if it proves successful, it is something I would like my colleagues and colleagues’ classes to become involved in. A blog to pass on for this class at Iona, rather than just for my iteration of this class at Iona.
I also turned off comments on the class blog. I found most students either only posted comments or only posted full posts, while very few did both. I think this semester, I am going to focus them more on the idea of blogging responses to their peers on the main page in posts that quote from and link to their peers posts. This is a more blog-like behavior after all, and I want them to be aware of the differences between this writing space, the other virtual spaces in which they write (email and chat), and the “meat-space / real world” spaces in which they write.
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