cac.ophony.org

Deborah, Jill, Mikhail and I are speaking today (Friday) at Baruch’s Ninth Annual Teaching and Technology Conference. One thing I am going to be speaking briefly about is different types of course blogs, and how they may lend themselves to supporting Communication Across the Curriculum. Since I have been dredging the ‘net to find samples, I have decided to post them here too.

I will offer these samples which represent a simple taxonomy of course blog structures:

1) Teacher writes, students read: this course blog is really a tool for professors making announcements, offering links, and clarifying assignments. Some professors post lectures or podcasts, or notes. While it is useful on many levels, the student is not actually involved as an active communicator (writing, speaking, or otherwise). Since it doesn’t satisfy the reasons I’d recommend course blogs, I won’t offer samples of these, but I will say that a google search will yield an enormous number of “course blogs” where they only person writing is the professor. All of the other kinds of course blogs I’ve seen, by the way, also include professor’s links, assignments, and the other items included in this category of blogs, but they also include the students’ presence to a much greater degree.

2) Teacher writes, students comment in detail: this is a big departure from the first category. Students are not writing the blog posts, but they are commenting / responding to them. Many professors, including this one at the University of Maryland, use this model in order to post assignments, ideas, or announcements and have students complete them in one place (the comments thread); ideally, the students are talking to each other as well as the professor. Matt Kirschenbaum says of the blog, in his syllabus for the course,

I will use the blog to post announcements, assignments, updates to the calendar, and other administrative items. I will also post questions, provocations, and items related to our current reading and discussions. You may respond to these in the comments section of each entry. I will take blog comments into account when evaluating class participation.

Here’s a sample posting, and the students’ discussion in the comments.

3) Students and teacher take turns writing to the blog and they all comment: since posting on the blog is in a sense primary (you go to the blog and you see the blog posting), and commenting is secondary (you have to click on “comments” to read them), this shifts the balance again. This structure is setting up a different kind of discussion. An example is this website for a course taught by Terra Williams and Charlie Lowe at Florida State: Writing, Researching and Reading the World Wide Web. In this entry, a student’s posting elicits comments (and comments upon comments).

4) Small groups of students have their own group blogs, and the teacher checks in on all of these: this might be useful for courses with group projects of some kind.

5) Teacher has a blog, every student has a blog, and they are all linked together via a central site: everyone posts, and everyone visits the various blogs and reads them. This may sound like a lot of work, but Bloglines or another RSS feed reading tool make it easy and quick to read lots of blogs on one page. It is a good structure if students are doing some sort of projects, as here, in Jane McGonigal’s Game Design as Art Practice course at the San Francisco Art Institute. This model gives every student their own space and they can complete assignments there, then visit classmates’ sites (or read them via an RSS feed reader). Here are two of the students’ blogs (which are linked from the central blog that the professor uses for her own announcements and assignments): kittyparty, and Imperfect Information.

Here’s another example: the Creating History in New Media course taught by Paula Petrik at George Mason. Here are two students’ blogs: Phyllis E. Slade-Martin’s blog and Robert Harless’s blog.
Here are some articles which might be of interest as you consider adding blogging to your course:

Weblogs in Education: Bringing the World to the Liberal Arts Classroom (Note: also applicable to non-Liberal Arts classrooms!)

The WiKipedia entry for blogs.

I have some others, but am out of time. If folks would like to comment below with their favorite blogging-in-college-courses links– preferably ones available online– I will add them to this list.