Educational Blogs: Status Report

I continue to have mixed feelings about educational blogs. Since September I've run blogs for my two classes and for the new certificate program that my department has set up. The program blog has been almost totally inactive, though I hope it'll pick up in January when a new batch of students enters.

The class blogs have also been less active than I'd hoped. But one of them, for the Outdoor Rec class, is showing some encouraging signs. Several students took up my invitation to become co-authors, and have begun posting items and photos. I expect to leave it in their hands when the course is over and I go on to teach the Tourism students (with a brand-new blog).

Meanwhile, the Legal Technicalities class blog hasn't shown much student activity, but it's drawn the interest of legal professionals not only in the US but as far away as Israel. One of them has even offered comments.

In both cases, the blogs have been chiefly of administrative use—a place for me to alert the class to next week's quiz, or to expand on some point raised in class. As far as I can tell, neither has really enhanced the educational quality of the course it serves. I plan to shut down the Legals blog next month when the course is over, and to leave the Outdoor Rec one mostly as a convenience to the students.

Next semester's Tourism blog will be as open as I can make it. I plan to invite students to become co-authors right away, and to bring their opinions (and links) to the blog whenever they like. But I don't want to make participation part of the grade; coercion seems to me to miss the point.

Another experiment is now under way: a private, password-protected blog for aspiring writers. I've begun with just three, all co-authors, and they've all been actively posting from the start. We're now even getting into posting long excerpts from novels in progress. I'm pleased but not really surprised; it's a small group of self-propelled, ambitious writers who really want to master the craft. They don't get grades, and if they choose not to post, that's up to them.

As in other forms of online teaching and learning, self-propulsion seems to be the key element here. The self-propelled student will put up with the inconvenience of an online course because it will get her where she wants to go. The teacher-propelled student, by contrast, is far more motivated by the social rewards of interacting face to face with instructor and classmates. Take that away, and learning isn't very attractive.

So I'll keep an eye on this new experimental blog, and see if we can add a member every few weeks...it may be that at a certain number, the site will either burst into really energetic life, or just burst.