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… .

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 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

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

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?

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!