Blogging Pedagogy

Ty Alyea's lesson plan involves using discussion boards to facilitate classroom conversation. Ty takes on the challenges of discussion boards, and presents strategies to pull students away from simply answering a discussion question, and instead push them towards placing their ideas within the academic conversation established by the other posts. Read on for Ty's adventures in using this assignment.

Q. How did your students respond to the assignment?

A. My students responded to this assignment well. Bringing the discussion board postings into the classroom encouraged students to reference and follow up on ideas put into the discussion by others. Additionally, the fact that all of the students know that their work will be looked at in class has encouraged them to polish their post up a little bit before submitting them.

Q. Is this an assignment you use regularly? Were there any unexpected problems or benefits?

A. I try to use this assignment twice a semester--once toward the beginning of the semester, and once in the middle of the semester. On some other weeks, I highlight individual posts that exemplify useful differences of interpretation that can help spur class discussion. The biggest difficulty I ran into was the fact that the volume of the material posted on the discussion board on any given week can be rather large and while some students can navigate through the conversations fairly quickly, others take a bit longer. For this reason, I single out a few "must read" threads of conversation that we can later discuss.

Q. What is your favorite aspect of this assignment?

A. My favorite part of the assignment is that it helps reinforce the students' sense that they are always writing for an audience and that their ideas are being actively engaged by their peers.

Q. If you were to use this lesson plan again, is there anything you would change?

A. In the future, I would like to follow up with a strategy that has been used by Mark Longaker, which involves assigning a couple of students to lead off the discussion by posting a bit earlier and requiring later posters to respond to the threads that have been begun by others.