Online Journals and the Writing Classroom

This semester, I decided to try Web Biographies as an instructional aid. When I did, I noticed a marked improvement in my students' quantity—and quality—of writing. Over the years, (as graduate student, and now faculty) I've found that students want new ways to write, and to share what they've written.

Recently, my Nature and Human Values students (it's a course that's unique to the Colorado School of Mines) have been creating online journals for their own writing, and responses to the semester's reading list. The assignment is similar to the traditional paper based reader-response journals that I've asked students to write in the past.