One nice thing about not having a regular readership is that you never have to apologize for getting lazy about posting.

One goal in keeping this blog was not only to experiment with the pedagogical use of blogs but also to write a pedagogical paper about well this worked. The first thing I've learned is that I have no idea how to write a pedagogical paper. If you're wondering what a pedagogical paper is, I would suggest first asking someone else. If you get a good answer, please be sure to let me know.

I've put together some notes on the topic, but now I need to put them together. Some of them have been appearing in my most recent entries (on anonymity and on attracting traffic through poor spelling).

The blog is a positive step forward over the already established practice of using journals in class. Blogs are more easily publicized, especially to other members of a class. This opens of the possibility of assignments that have all the advantages of personal journals, but also allow for collaborative learning. The responsibility of writing for an audience enforeces a certain discipline on students. Instead of sharing their personal insights, it encourages writing in way that communicates clearly. I think that both of these are useful improvements over the traditional class journal.

The journal already had several advantages, first, it encourages frequent writing. I used journals in tandem with more formal papers. The journals provided a nice opportunity for first drafts of passages and a place to try out ideas before committing to them. The papers then provide a place for more polished, revised prose. Second, this is a single project that can span the entire semster and allow for more integration. (In a writing intensive class, it can provide a single project that integrates all of the reading from the semester. This would allow papers to either focus closely on single text or use material that students have identified themselves.)

Other things I've learned,

1. Students aren't particularly keen on commenting on the work of others. In addition to whatever social pressures might be involved, commenting is simply more work and students aren't really interested in doing this unless they can see what's to be gained by commenting on the works of others.

2. Students are very interesting in receiving comments on their own work. Students learn from feedback in their work, they know this and they tend to value comments made on their work. At least this is my experience.

3. These sorts of projects can become very labor intensive for instructors. Students want interaction with the instructor and they want feedback on their work. Since posts can go up at anytime, this can lead to a constant stream of commenting work by the instructor and writing comments can be very time consuming. I'm beginning to figure out how to make commenting a little easier through the use of rubrics (in essence, grading forms) when grading papers, but I can't this that this would lessen the flood of reading and commenting that constantly updating journals can involve.

So, the challenge for an instructor using blogs in class is to design assignments in such a way that students are encouraged to engage each other's work (perhaps by requiring a certain number of comments per term) and not to expect feedback on everything they write (perhaps by asking them to select their own favorites for grading at the end of the semester, students should definitely be informed of how frequent comments are to expected at the beginning of the semester.)

I'll probably be continuing to reflect on blog experience for the next week or so in this space, then summer school will start and this may fill up with things I'm thinking about that relate to each class (perhaps follow ups to class discussions, links to relevant material etc.) More traditionally blogerific content will be pushed more and more into my other blog.  ¶ #

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