Blogging Pedagogy

I'm hoping to crowdsource some brainstorming about the pedagogical potential of blogging on learning. Lately, in my work with Dan Hickey's 21st Century Assessment Project, I've been thinking tons about how integrating blogging in the writing classroom might build a rich new media learning environment that focuses on a wide range of literacy practices. I've started a provisional list below but am hoping that others (most importantly for me, people who have worked with blogs in their classrooms) can offer ideas for additions to this list.

“Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing” is a new project to compile a free Creative Commons rhetoric and composition textbook meant for undergraduates. They are calling for chapter proposals (Writing Spaces) to be submitted by April 10th. If anybody is looking for a publication, this might be a good opportunity.

I'm looking for suggestions from my fellow teachers, regarding encouraging a risk-averse student to make mistakes. Read on for full details ...

The London Times Higher Education Supplement has an editorial up on the practice of marginal annotation in paper grading. Here's the link:

Margins Aren't Meant to be Written In

My comments after the break ...

I am facing a new difficulty this term. Some of my students are too engaged.

Your friends at the Undergraduate Writing Center have published the latest issue of Praxis: A Writing Center Journal. This issue's theme is "Diversity in the Writing Center," and we have a number of articles that should be of interest to people on this blog, particularly in the areas of ESL education, writing instruction, and writing center pedagogy.

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.

write poems!!

So, on a whim (sort of), I set up a forum for original poems. That is, poems written by students in my E314 Reading Poetry class. I sensed I had a number of writers, but was a little hesitant to ask them to actually lay it out.

My students often making sweeping statements about "red states" and "blue states" which don't bear any resemblance to reality. The "red vs. blue" maps that the media trot out after each presidential election may be useful representations of how the Electoral College has voted, but they're useless for anything else, and contribute to grossly simplified views of how people vote. So I decided to go look for a "purple" map.

More below the fold ...