Hi Caren.... as you may have seen I use Blogging in an education setting. One of the most interesting side effects has been the way I have been able to connect disadvantaged students learning ouside the university with students on-campus. But in both cases the only way I can get it to work is to make the blogging a compulsory part of their writing assessment. Without this incentive I feel that Blogging would die on the vine. And this brings with it some other difficulties. By and large colleagues feel that Blogging is a soft option and isn't challenging the students enough. I personally disagree and feel it gives students a dynamic creative space to express themselves in their terms... but other academics are hard to convince on this: tied as they are to more conventional modes of assessment..... just a few thoughts..... and a link to one of my recent success stories:
http://www.acu.edu.au/294135
Cheers
Michael
Michael Griffith
Posts made by Michael Griffith
Great to hear that others are using Blogging for teaching literature. How do you use it Dilip? Do you have a regular fixed, assessable requirement? How do you encourage your students to engage?
Cheers
Michael
Cheers
Michael
Hi Glenn... there have been mixed responses. The first cohort that I had (back in 2005) were thrown into the deep end and all used LiveJournal in an open environment. We were all new to this at that time. Some students were nervous, but most seemed to love the opportunity, not only to share with each other, but also with family, friends and students from other institutions. Several students boasted about how they had received commendations from overseas- and in one case a professor at BC asked one of my students whether he would be happy to have is poem published.
This group of students were upset when they were told they had to go behind a firewall... and they were also responding to my unhappiness at seeing a good thing being forced underground.(with no good reason- might I add: while the legal eagles were nervous about possible student harassment and/ or litigation, no single event had come to anyone's notice about the work that was happening in our LiveJournal Blog.....
Be that as it may, the recent co- hort of students who began behind the firewall with WordPress are now nervous about the possibility of going "outside".... I suggest to them, that if they want to be seen by the big wide world, then exporting from WordPress.org to Wordpress.com is a no-brainer.... but I would say there are only around 5% who take up this suggestion.... Hope that seeds the discussion.
Cheers
Michael
This group of students were upset when they were told they had to go behind a firewall... and they were also responding to my unhappiness at seeing a good thing being forced underground.(with no good reason- might I add: while the legal eagles were nervous about possible student harassment and/ or litigation, no single event had come to anyone's notice about the work that was happening in our LiveJournal Blog.....
Be that as it may, the recent co- hort of students who began behind the firewall with WordPress are now nervous about the possibility of going "outside".... I suggest to them, that if they want to be seen by the big wide world, then exporting from WordPress.org to Wordpress.com is a no-brainer.... but I would say there are only around 5% who take up this suggestion.... Hope that seeds the discussion.
Cheers
Michael
Good to hear from you Sylvia... while I am deep into end of year marking I will look up occasionally and see what I can learn from (and add to) that conversation... Yes amazing.... where did that 3 years go!
Cheers
Michael
Cheers
Michael
Hi all, just catching the tail end of this conversation (or is it the beginning). I facilitated a discussion on Scope a year or so ago on Blogging and am still now using it actively in my university teaching; in fact I have just finished a short research project in which I have tried to identify student perceptions of the value of blogging as part of their study of literature. I am interested in the extent to which it assists their engagement with texts and with each other. Typically I mandate that students do a weekly blog on their literature reading (which can also include more personal reflections); they must also make a weekly comment on each other's work. I give them feedback on their grammar and writing skills and insist that these are A1. At the end of the semester they have a major project in which they utilize their semester worth of blogging and transform their work (critical, creative and reflective) into an ePortfolio. Currently I am using WordPress for their blogging and this turns nicely into a platform for their ePortfolio where they simply post "Pages" instead of "Posts". While my work with on-campus students is behind a university Fire-wall I consistently copy my behind fire-wall blog onto a public blogging space. You can find these at either of the following two addresses:
http://michaelgriffith1.wordpress.com
http://michaelgriffith.livejournal.com
There is a little bit of local history involved with my switch from LiveJournal (which I still love) to WordPress. Our university mandated that for the purposes of student security they be put behind a fire-wall (not all were happy with this). So I was moved from LiveJournal to WordPress.org.
I have also published on my work. You can find a chapter in the book
Empowering Adult Learners through Blog: An Australian Case Study, (with Loong Wong), Chapter 2 of Adult Learning in the Digital Age. Terry T. Kidd (Ed.). Igi Global: 2010. There is a link to this book at: http://www.igi-global.com/bookstore/Chapter.aspx?TitleId=36854
Look forward to hearing some responses
Best wishes
Michael (Australian Catholic University- Sydney Campus)