{"id":11857,"date":"2012-10-05t08:00:26","date_gmt":"2012-10-05t13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/?p=11857"},"modified":"2013-08-13t14:20:46","modified_gmt":"2013-08-13t19:20:46","slug":"11857","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"\/\/www.imrbdigital.com\/2012\/10\/11857\/","title":{"rendered":"ask professor pedagogy: using course blogs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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ask professor pedagogy<\/strong> is a twice monthly advice column written by 2022年世界杯中国小组赛积分 staff. one aspect of our mission is to cultivate dialogue about teaching and learning, so we welcome questions and concerns that arise in the classroom; particularly those from vanderbilt faculty, students, and staff. if you have a question that you’d like professor p to address, please send it to us<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

professor p,<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

i think it’s time – i\u2019m ready to try out some new teaching strategies. i\u2019ve been wondering about using a blog. got any tips for me?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

graduate student in a&s<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

dear longing for blogging,<\/p>\n

tips? of course i have tips! but what you need are some concrete strategies.<\/p>\n

let me start by asking you this: why do you want to incorporate blog into the course you\u2019re teaching? is it because you want to get your students more engaged with writing about the course topics? is it because you want them to interact with one another? do you want them to create a document that will \u2018live on\u2019 after the course is finished? \u00a0your answer to these questions is important. if you want to add a blog to a course because it seems \u2018cool\u2019 \u2013 don\u2019t. your students will see right through that! the blog should be relevant to your course, talked about in-class, and should add value to the learning going on both in and out of class.<\/p>\n

strategy #1: decide how the blog will relate to your course<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

since you didn\u2019t say what your discipline is, i\u2019ll give you an example of how you might use a blog in both the sciences and the humanities. \u00a0if you\u2019re teaching, say, a biology course you might check out\u00a0bears in the sea<\/a> which is a baylor university blog that documents the experiences of students and faculty as they participate in introductory biology courses. this blog is an example of a blog that \u2018lives on\u2019 after the student completes the course. on the other hand, mark sample at george mason university uses a\u00a0blog<\/a> in his american postmodernism course to encourage reflections on course readings – something quite common in the humanities.<\/p>\n

so consider if you want to create blog that primarily documents the work that you and your students are doing so future students can learn from it (like the bears in the sea example) or a blog that asks your students to write reflections on readings related to your course (like sample’s example). of course, folks use blogs in their courses in\u00a0other ways<\/a> too, but how you choose to will depend on your answers to the questions that i asked earlier.<\/p>\n

strategy #2: decide how you will grade blog participation<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

much to my chagrin, it\u2019s true: grades are important. and grades are motivators for students. ask them to write a blog post each week \u2018just because\u2019 and you\u2019re likely to get very little participation. ask them to follow a clear set of guidelines to meet a certain course requirement and you\u2019re likely to get much more participation.\u00a0 but how do you grade activity on a blog? it\u2019s up to you, but here are two common approaches:<\/p>\n

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  1. create a rubric and share it with your students. <\/strong>show them what a \u201c5 out of 5\u201d post or comment looks like and what a \u201c1 out of 5\u201d post or comment looks like. this rubric by\u00a0mark sample<\/a> of george mason university is so simple that after some use you\u2019ll be able to quickly grade any given blog post. further, you can enlist your own students to help with grading by assigning the tasks to a group of students each week who are “in charge” of reading and grading according to the rubric.<\/li>\n
  2. give word count guidelines.<\/strong> for instance, gardner campbell at virginia tech has used this statement in a syllabus before:\u00a0comments and posts of 500 words or less on the class blog\u00a0that are helpful to the class<\/strong> will be worth 10% of your grade.<\/em> you can adapt his statement to work for you. (gardner actually has many great examples of how he grades in his blog post\u00a0blogs and baobabs<\/a>. check it out.)<\/del> professor p is guilty of not reading closely enough. gardner campbell’s blog post<\/a> is very useful, but it doesn’t advocate for word counts on student blog posts!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    strategy #3: mention the blog during class<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

    so you go to the trouble of setting up a blog, you have a wonderful vision for how it will work\u2026 but how do you get your students to actually blog? well, i think first of all, you need to talk about it. in-class. how do you do that?<\/p>\n