blogs and teaching

I’d mentioned here that we’ve started using blogs throughout our Media Studies program. They are to be used throughout the three years of their program, and not just as an adjunct (or more) for one particular course. They’ve been introduced into the second semester, largely because first semester introduced across most of their subjects the practice and discipline of journal writing (traditional journals).

Because it is integrated across the three years of the curriculum they have been introduced ‘gently’. Which just means this semester they are to use their blogs more as traditional journals. We did set up blog rolls, turned on trackback, but there is no assessment or other expectation that they would have to read each other’s blogs, comment on each other’s writing, and so forth.

In second year blogs as social emergent networks will be foregrounded, amongst other things (wikis and more general social software networks), and it is at this point that inserting themselves very specifically into blogging as a specific practice will be expected.

Well, more fool I. Ducks to water. What is happening in their blogs is similar to what used to happen years ago when I first introduced students to email lists. Many are prolific writers, they are all reading each other’s blogs (a conversation in class yesterday, I ask “How would you do x?” One student replies “Nico wrote about that in his blog” and proceeded to find the entry), linking to each other, and so on.

At the moment, as Ali observes (remember this is a first year student):

Which does seem to be the case. There is a flurry of reading and writing that is impressive. Yes, it is primarily social, but remember, this is first year. This is helping develop community in the group, which is important as by third year we expect these students to be doing a lot of collaborative research and production work. It is also letting them own this space, and helping the students to develop their blog voices. There have been some issues, offensive or rude material, but to date I have not had to intervene and they have successfully negotiated these issues themselves. Which is as it ought to be.

Using blogs so broadly within an entire course is proving to be an interesting experiment, and to date certainly supports my initial hunches about its relevance and use.