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"Blogs and teaching"
09/14/2003 Entry
Henry over at Crooked Timber has posted some thoughts on the use of blogs in teaching. Liz has posted on this topic as well. (Kara used one last semester for her course on Media in the Information Age, but that does not seem to be accessible at this point).
Instead of contributing to the list of ways in which one may be able to use a blog for teaching, I thought I'd throw out some questions to ponder:
1. Is it always preferable to have classroom discussions done publicly? Should all these blogs be open to the entire blogosphere or is there value in having discussions open to class participants only? (And here I don't simply mean that only students in the classroom should be able to comment, but in general whether the readership should always be a wider audience.)
2. Should there be a concern about people posting under other people's names? This is a potential concern for any blog and I have never seen it discussed, but it is a possibility. I don't know if a student would care to do this, but they could if they wanted given the comments options in most blogging software. Sure, IP addresses may be recorded, but on a college campus it is not too hard to find a public machine and they do not always require passwords for access.
I am not trying to be super paranoid with either of these questions. I'm just curious as to what people think about these potential issues.
Also, I'm not fully convinced why some of the things suggested (posting syllabus, assignmnents and some changes) are not just as easy (or easier) to achieve on a simple Web page.
[On a different note. It's funny that my entry is posted on Sept 14th in response to an entry blogged on Sept 15th.]
Replies: 3 Comments have been posted, click here to see them and add your own
I took the Media in the Information Age blog down back when I was running out of space on my web site host. I recently increased my web site capacity - if anyone wants to see what the pages looked like I would be happy to send them in an email (or repost them on my site). Let me know - kara at karakerwin dot net.
As for Eszter's questions. . .
1) Although it wasn't a major part, occasionally "random" people did post comments - the students thought that was pretty cool. The issues in my class weren't incredibly controversial, and there really wasn't much in terms of heated debated.
2. Linking posts to some form of class credit seems to make students post under their own names. When I had entries that asked for feedback on the class, I always stated that it was anonymous and not-for-credit.
Posted by Kara @ 09/15/2003 07:07 AM CST
I think there is some cause for mild paranoia. We're still thrashing through Online Teaching issues after a student created a web based email address for his tutor and then sent abusive messages to classmates on behalf of the tutor. The hapless tutor was stood down pending review as at that stage it was acceptable to use non-university emails to communicate with students. Needless to say there is now a blanket ban on non uni email usage for both staff and students. But certainly the concerns that Ezsther raises are right at the centre of our school's debates at present. Look forward to hearing others views.
Posted by Jen Frahm @ 09/16/2003 01:28 AM CST
I'm afraid I don't have much to say on the topic of "identity stealing" on my class blogs. We use a little-known system called TCDocs, which requires users to login in order to be able to post or leave comments.
However, I do have strong feelings about keeping them open to the public -- an action I think is vital to the medium. As an example, I'll take the trials of one of my students who rather harshly critiqued one of the early assigned readings in the course (I teach a design class and the article was written by Adam Greenfield). Because his article was linked off of my class blog, Adam found my student's critique through his referer logs and got in touch with my class (by email) with his rebuttal.
That interaction served to motivate my class. The fact that there were other living, breathing people out there passionately doing what they were learning about started to drive them forward. They're moving faster than any class I've run through a weblog, so much the I'm having trouble keeping up.
Taking away the chances for serendipitous connections by locking down class weblogs is removing one of the biggest pulls the medium has. I for one think "open" is the best policy.
Posted by Nick @ 09/16/2003 09:19 AM CST
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