On April 8, 2010, I attended the Southern States Communication Association’s Conference. I presented over How to Use Blogging in Communication Education. Here are the highlights of what I discussed.
I use the blog to teach Web Writing because it takes away the design issue. My students still need to use design, but that is another class. What they do need to learn is how to connect to the audience. All semester my students have kept a blog of their choice. They had to pick a relevant topic and create content for their blog.
Cons
- Students didn’t pick topics that they could write 25 posts over. Instead, students topics that sounded easy to them instead of them picking a topic they were passionate about.
- Students didn’t write regularly, instead they ended up having 7-10 posts by April. Now, they have to figure out how to write 25 quality blog posts in 2 weeks.
Pros
- I have students who WANT to continue writing their blog
- I have students who were creative with content and were excited about their topics.
- Students’ writing improved over time if they wrote regularly.
What would I do differently, I would make sure students wrote 3-4 posts a week. If they achieved their goal, I would reward them with weekly points just for writing. Students need an incentive to write. Most of the class time was for writing. I was disappointed in how my class handled workshop days. Writing in class is an opportunity for me to look at their work. No one took me up on my offer to help and to read. They did not seem to “get” that this is their GRADE for the semester even though I repeated this twice a week and told them what I expected. In fact, I gave them an outline for the project at the beginning of the semester that showed the rubric and went over good and bad blogs. I would give them a pep talk about content and audience. It just doesn’t click with these students who do not have an interest in writing.
As for my Introduction to Computer-Mediated Class, I have them blog reading responses. The blog is their domain to discuss the issues of CMC. I will grade to see if they have the proper number of posts and have met the guidelines. I find that this space can help them with their research papers.
Overall, I have no sympathy for my students who can’t keep up. The project is laid out in the syllabus and I state in my syllabus one must know and learn the technology to do the project. I will help my students in any way possible. Their excuse that they have nothing ELSE to write about just means they are not trying HARD enough to come up with content. My Web Writing class is an upper level writing course. Unfortunately, students who take my class are not given enough papers to hone their critical analysis skills.
What students think:
I asked my CMC class what they thought about using blogs in education. Here are some thoughts:
1. Blogs are unlike essays even though I make the same guidelines.
2. The Internet is their personal space and they do not like to overlap their space with school work.
3. Blogs enhance bad writing skills.
4. Blogs are too informal–even though I ask them to use an extra article.
5. Students feel vulnerable sharing their ideas with others rather than with just the professor.
{ 2 comments }
Saw this on Twitter. It’s really interesting to read what a professor thought of their class after it has ended. I have a few thoughts of my own that I’d like to share, if that’s okay.
I appreciated the in-class writing time. It gave me an opportunity to get organized, research recipes, and write up ideas for posts. Unfortunately, I couldn’t edit photos on the class computers, but writing the posts was half the battle. Even more unfortunately, my buffoon friends thought the in-class writing time was a free-for-all, so they chose to watch inane YouTube videos at high volume and research Pokemon. So annoying. Whatever; it was their choice. Still, I know there were a few students who definitely appreciated the extra time.
In the beginning of our class, I was really skeptical about blogging because I thought it’d be like writing a personal journal, and that it would be too casual. Not really. Just like with essays for literature classes, or research papers, you have to be professional in your posts. Blogs require research and quality content, too! The only difference for me was that I could be a lot more conversational, have a sense of humor, and be more creative in my blog rather than my other papers for school.
Now that everything has settled down for all of my classes, I seriously want to revamp my blog. I’ve been drawing up plans for it (Step #1: Use Reddit). Guess you converted another student to the dark side.
See you in the summer!
I agree with everything you said. Now to work on how to get students to take this project seriously. I tried to help you all get to 25 and I stuck to 25 because of the lack of effort shown IN class. Grades will reflect effort… if you look at the final rubric on handout I gave you the beginning of the semester it shows that if you didn’t have content or it’s poorly written, you might as well dropped the course.
I’m so excited you will want to revamp your blog… you are talented.
See you in a few weeks!