This semester, we’re managing our largest lift on Blogs@Baruch yet. In addition to an increasing variety of projects that I’ll blog about in the coming weeks, every Freshman Seminar at Baruch currently is blogging. That’s roughly 60 sections, populated by over 1200 students.
Baruch Freshmen at Convocation, September 2009. Click to see photo in its original location.
Yowser.
Each Seminar is directed by a Peer Mentor, a talented upper level Baruch student responsible for helping newcomers adjust to life at Baruch. The seminars meet every other week, and Freshpersons are required to attend lectures, panels, exhibits, seminars, and trainings, distributed across six “enrichment” areas over the course of the term. Then they’re supposed to blog about their experiences, and discuss them when they meet with their classmates.
Launching the project was a bit of bear, as we had to create the blogs, get the users registered, tie the whole deal together, and give some training to the Peer Mentors, who are crucial to the project. Ultimately, I created a custom theme (built on Carrington Blog), with certain core components to which each section would have access– a List of Seminars and Peer Mentors, a Guide to Blogging for Freshmen (produced by the Office of Student Affairs, who directs FRO), a description of the six enrichment areas, and a Google Calendar that displays upcoming events. I then created a Mother Blog, which syndicates posts from across the sixty sections of FRO, using the FeedWordPress plugin. The Mother Blog collects and stores all of the posts in one place, allowing faculty and administrators to look in on the writing that’s happening in FRO. Students are thus contributing to small discussions in their seminars, and also to a broader discussion among all Freshmen.
Thus far, they’ve been writing quite willingly. In the fewer than three weeks since this thing was launched, we’ve aggregated about 900 posts; at the pace we’re going, we should reach well more than 4000 unique posts by the end of the semester. That doesn’t even begin to address the commenting, which has varied in intensity across the individual blogs. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to mirror comments between the original location of the post and the space where it is republished… if we did, and we hope to be able to do that soon, the level of dynamism would increase.
Needless to say, we’re looking at an awful lot of writing, and we’re trying to make sense of it in a few ways. We’ve created categories on the Mother Blog for each of the six enrichment areas so that posts directly pertaining to them can be easily sorted. This will allow the two administrators who oversee FRO– Mark Spergel, the Director of Student Orientation and Freshman Year Incentive, and Shadia Sachedina, the Associate Director of Student Life– to get student perspectives on the wide range of extra-curricular programs the school offers. Further, simple searches will allow certain segments of the Baruch community to see what students are saying about them. For instance, many of the early posts offered student perspective on tours of the library. Our librarians have already begun searching for “library” and “library tour” on the FRO blog to read student responses. Several blog posts have engaged Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, the Freshman text.
Other searches hold the potential to help identify students with like interests: “photography,” “history,” and “football” all offer returns. Such a use of the FRO Mother Blog suggests another function that this project can play, perhaps more effectively in future iterations: social networking. As a commuter campus, we constantly struggle to help our students see themselves as part of a community, and FRO attempts to address that tension. Integrating Blogs@Baruch into FRO makes that attempt much stronger, as students can more easily find, connect, and engage with their classmates through our platform. Next year, I’d love to get BuddyPress working in this project to foreground the social networking component… but, one step at a time.
At the end of the term, we’ll have, easily collected and archived, multiple writing samples from the majority of incoming students. With some more thinking and organization, this holds great potential for assessment, integration into writing instruction, early intervention, and assistance for ESL students. Ultimately, this project allows us the opportunity to further the core missions of Blogs@Baruch: increasing the amount and variety of writing that our students do, and nurturing critical thinking about the use of digital tools throughout the Baruch College community. Given the hectic nature of our launch this year, we weren’t able to spend enough time thinking collectively about the general education opportunities embedded in this project. I had argued that we should do a pilot with 20% of the sections so that we could be sure to more closely support our users and think more intensively about the implications of what we’re doing, but for various reasons, a small-scale pilot wasn’t feasible. But when we do this again, we know that the canvas works, what the challenges are in the mechanics of the thing, and how to improve our planning. We’ll be able to make a more significant investment in helping the Peer Mentors better understand the possibilities and implications of doing college work on the open web, crucial knowledge that they can then pass on to all Freshpersons.
Luke,
The news of BDP RSS’s death ahs been greatly exaggerated by me, and I regret it now. I will post about how it is still indeed working on UMW Blogs, and you might consider using this to grab the comment feeds of the 1200+ students and running them through BDP RSS. It may sound crazy, and it is, but if you have all the urls for the 1200 blogs, you can simply append /comments/feed to each one with a find and replace, and then copy them in BDP RSS separated by spaces (no commas) and you can get an OPML feed of the 1200 comment feeds. You can then publish this in the sidebar of the mother blog.
You can build it! But more importantly, what you all have done at Baruch with Blogs@Baruch is nothing short of amazing, you all deserve a huge round of congratulations. You have brought an entire class of students into conversation with one another, it is an amazing feat that should not be discounted. Viva Blogs@Baruch…viva CUNY!
Thanks, Jimmy! I’ll look into BDP RSS, though, frankly, I’m a little scared to add another layer of syndication until we get moved to our new beast of a box… hopefully we’ll be able to add that in later in the semester. This term, we’ve just been trying to see if we can do it… next time around, we’re really gonna do it right.
Luke,
What you have done is fantastic! It sounds like students are having a terrific time. I really like your idea of Peer Mentors. Are you running WordPress MU on your own servers or is it hosted?
Geetha:
Thanks for the comment. I can’t take credit for the PMs… that goes to Mark and Shadia. And, we are running our own version of MU, hosted by our colleagues at BCTC.
LW
Amazing work, guys. This is a huge step for Baruch in particular and CUNY more generally. The world is watching (and admiring) this experiment!
The project is very interesting, and I’m sure some faculty members would love to replicate it on a smaller scale in their classes. But many would not be able to set it up simply by following written descriptions. As with other creative and worthwhile ideas that involve technology, I wish video demonstrations and instructions could be posted online that would guide interested people through the steps. With video demos everybody would have quick access, and more people would be enticed to try wonderful ideas, such as this one.
Elisabeth:
Thanks for the comment.
Actually, many professors can and have launched blogs by following written instructions; others have followed the written and video instructions here; and, yet others have requested and received group or one-on-one instruction. Beyond FRO, we’ve supported around 70 individual classes (as well as several administrative uses of the system) in the three semesters we’ve been active, and each of these has used the system differently. Setting up a blog is only the start; faculty members often need to work through the implications of teaching their courses on this medium, and that usually calls for a conversation or two.
This semester, we hope to increase the variety of asynchronous support we offer for faculty, but that work is labor-intensive, and I am essentially the only staff supporting the system (though some of our fellows have been chipping in wonderfully). I agree that a series of screencasts would be helpful, and it’s on my list of things-to-do.
In the meantime, all a faculty member needs to do to in order to receive support for a particular project is ask!
Luke
Great stuff! I can’t imagine coordinating all of those sections and getting everyone on the same page … huge task. One thing something like this does is expose great writing — not every post will be solid, but after a bit you’ll begin to discover a few people who are truly inspired writers — and in that I see the huge return. Without initiatives like this, the writings of a few great students would go unnoticed. Great work!
Cole:
You’re absolutely right. If nothing else, this project promises to turn on its head prior conceptions about the writing ability of our Freshmen. We’ve already seen it, and Mikhail and I are talking about the IRB implications of studying and sharing this stuff. There’s something empowering about student writing WITHOUT direction from faculty, without the pressure of a grade… it removes their nerves and lets them be them. We’re now at over 1100 posts… students blogging in class rarely write so freely and often. It helps also that they’re first semester Freshmen, and perhaps many don’t have enough knowledge to weigh down their writing. I recently found a paper I wrote in my first year of college… it had a bounce and a snap to it that I only wish I could have grafted onto my dissertation. Of course the research was crap…
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Thanks for the comment, and we’ve love to have more input from you and your crew at PSU as we try to make sense of all of this and think of even better ways to do it next year.
Thanks for the resource references, Luke. I’ve always been impressed how well teaching with technology is supported at Baruch, and think that especially the offer to get one-on-one tutorials on various techniques is excellent. I still think, however, that a clearinghouse of sorts, a place where a collection of different techniques is presented, would be beneficial. Some folks don’t know what all is available, and it would help to have a website with an overview of the different techniques (e.g., name of technique and one-paragraph description) and then links to a more detailed description (including application examples) and/or a video with instructions.