Yet Another Midterm Report

My students, with a few exceptions, continue to avoid posting in their course blogs. My faculty colleagues are even more reticent. The blogs I left up last semester have been deserted by the students they were created for. So as a means of voluntary interaction, they leave a lot to be desired.

As an administrative convenience, however, blogs have their uses. My Web Content course meets tonight in a computer lab. Rather than have them chasing all over the Web while I scribble URLs on the whiteboard, I've uploaded links to their blog, offering a number of sites dealing with intellectual property. The links include a slide-show tutorial on US copyright law and a concise summary (with links) of Canadian copyright law.

I've also posted a handout I'll use in tomorrow morning's first-year tourism class. This is mostly for the convenience of anyone who misses class, or who loses the handout. At least I won't have to dig the item out of my files when people come looking for it.

Comments

[Mark]

I'm sharing your experience (pain?). I've been running a blog for my students for couple of months, posting half-a-dozen of so media and course related items a week. I know the students have read some of those posts (they had to; they detailed assignments), but the rest of what I've done is floating free in cyberspace. Students will go to the site when I specifically mention it in class, give it a once-over and move on. I'm going to keep doing it, though. I figure if it helps keep the fire burning in an occasional student it's worth the effort.

[Crawford Kilian]

Thanks for your comments, Mark. I'll probably keep some of my course blogs going while shutting others down. I'm also thinking about creating a kind of "wide-open" education blog intended mostly for students and (foreign) teachers of English as a foreign language.

Some of my Asian pen pals are teachers with considerable grasp of English, but when their students ask about recondite points, they don't know what to say. (I have the same feelings sometimes when my students ambush me!)

But this new blog will have to wait until the spring semester is over and I can find a little time.

[Dennis G. Jerz]

Crawford, instead of creating course blogs, I gave each student a personal blog. I admit to feeling a little displaced because I can't point to one blog and say "this is why my EL150 students are doing," but since my classroom is web-enhanced, rather than web-based, we have pleny of other opporutnities to forge and celebrate a group identity.

A few students who expressed interest in personalizing their blogs asked me how to do it; I showed them a few tips, and quickly they began teaching others. Now they are experimenting with color schemes, adding web counters and animations, and basically enjoying themselves.

Of course, there are also plenty of students who blog only the bare minimum, and plenty of others who don't even do that.

Still, I think we've reached critical mass...

I note that my students don't tend to link to each other very often, in part because the core group of bloggers already reads each other's blogs and, considering their blogging in many ways an extension of their offline academic and social lives, doesn't feel the need to introduce outsiders to the material they discuss. But some of the most devoted bloggers aren't even in any of my classes -- they may have already been blogging somewhere else, and when they saw the opporturnity to blog under the school's banner, they asked to join. We've even had one alum who wants to blog with us.

If you're interested, visit http://blogs.setonhill.edu/nmj