4. Weaknesses
Blogs are a little more difficult to set up than an e-mail account but not much more. Some students will have trouble signing up and using the blog. It took a couple of weeks to get every student signed up. There are students who do not use the blog just as there are students that don’t do homework or write in paper journals (no matter what the point value of the journal may be). Not all students have computers at home, but since the college has a computer lab, this is not a problem.
Some students in my class expressed concern that blogs are less private than other kinds of online discussions, but the blogs at blogger.com will allow you to control access to blogs. A student can limit access to a select class or class members.
posted by Geoff Cain @ 12:18 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
One more thing concerning evaluation:
I was very impressed with your rubric. I think it does an excellent job of giving the students an idea of what a good, readable blog entry is.
In my case, because I wanted to use blogs as solely for tools of communication, students would receive credit for writing in their blog and posting a comment regardless of the kind of entry they wrote.
I was wondering if your students continue to write in their blogs after their class with you has ended. I think the weak point of evaluating blogs is that students lose ownership; blogs are written for a grade rather than a means of self-expression and then are abandoned after the class is finished.
The good point about evaluating blogs is that it motivates students to write in them!
we switched from using a listserv to blogging a couple of years ago and while we are very happy with the work we have received, we have found that the quality of the interaction has gone down, so we have had to do other things to get the students to interact
Hi JH,
I found that the problems I encountered were about the same as I would find in any class that had a journal assignment (maybe combined with peer review). I was able to dedicate a class period to getting students online. I found that demonstration and instructional handouts were essential. There were still students who didn't want to get involved but their motivational problems would have manifested in other ways if it wasn't the blog.
I am not really a blog advocate -- I am looking for ways to encourage community building in the classroom, encourage a continuation of the learning beyond the class walls. I am using blogs to accomplish this at the moment.
Hi Cherepaha,
I would be interested to know what assignments were being used with the blogs. I think that assignments have to be designed to encourage and facilitate interactivity. There are ways to do this with blogs just as there are ways to do this with any other media.
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