Computer Writing and Research Lab | University of Texas at Austin

Student blogs and agenda setting

Submitted by gavinbenke on October 26, 2007 - 9:20am

As I understand it, one of the great triumphs of the software industry was to let users create their own communities - where they often found and corrected bugs and other technical issues before the company did. As a result, the user had a hand in defining the product and its use.

I find that a similar thing has developed with my class blog. I assigned a number of blog posts about the class reading. These posts were due before class and were meant to provide material for class discussion as well as compel students to actually do the reading.

However, I have noticed a shift in the way the class blog is functioning. A sizable number of my students' posts are after class discussions. While my first reaction was to be annoyed by students not reading the assignment carefully and posting late, many of these posts have not been without merit. They are often extensions of and reactions to the class discussion and have provided a sense of continuity to the class meetings. To be sure, some of these posts merely parrot class discussions. Still, the majority of the posts have been thoughtful and beneficial to the class.

In terms of smaller, shorter assignments (not term papers or exams) it's got me thinking about decentered learning and the like. When it seems like students are using such assignments in a different manner than their original intent, how much leeway should an instructor give them? Is it better for students to learn to operate within the prescribed boundaries of an assignment, or, like software companies, should instructors be alert to the possibility of students - as end-users - improving the product?

»

on students and blogs

Submitted by billwolff on October 27, 2007 - 1:26pm.

I like how you are framing this discussion in terms of improving upon the nature of the assignment. I am using collaborative blogs this semester for the first time. Each blog has a group of 4-5 students who contribute to it, name it, theme it, etc. I'm using Wordpress. For the first few reading responses I asked students to respond to a particular prompt by a certain time so they could get comfortable with writing in this new new space. The blogs, in this way, functioned very much like a forum post: respond to a prompt by a certain time, make sure it is at least a certain length, etc.

Blogs, however, have a very different nature as a medium. Posts are generated at the will of the author, not an outsider assigning a topic. Topics are also determined by the author(s) of the blog, and hopefully fit within a theme for the blog overall.

As a result, after the first few response assignments, I told my students that they were no longer going to have prompts that ask for a response by a certain date and time and topic. Rather, as bloggers, they would have the freedom to post at their will and on topics that they identified earlier in the semester as their primary educational, professional, and personal interests. They would, however, be required to post no less than 4 a week (which is fairly typical for a blog that I would consider to be consistently posted-to, and at least 1 of them should be on the topic of the readings. If there were 4 group members, that would be 16 posts a week, in total.

When asked how long the posts should be, I stated, "As long as you feel the subject of the post deserves--which is what bloggers do. Sometimes the posts are long detailed discussions, sometimes they are brief, sometimes they are just a link or an embedded video. The goal is not to monitor what you are writing and how long the posts are, but for you to begin to think and write like the kind of blogger than you want to be."

The results have been wonderful; students respond to readings in multiple posts and in multiple ways. They respond before and after class (on a few occasions, in class). They discuss their own interests in relation to what we have been reading, and they feel free to make them as long or as short as they see fit. In short, they are taking ownership of these new writing spaces and we have been able to discuss not only the topics of their posts, but why they chose to post it in such a way. I read their blogs in my netvibes.com ecosystem (essentially a robust RSS reader), as do they in their own ecosystems.

So, in answer to your question, I guess my answer is that students operating within the practices of a writing medium is more important than the artificiality of a due date. For formal papers, yes, the due date is firm, but that is also a convention of the formal document.

Good luck!

Bill

»