Due to illness’ I am now officially two weeks behind in assessing student work. This means the computer system where I enter marks is officially closed, and so students who are busy checking their results online are seeing themselves with either a result withheld or fail. This is not good. Due to other circumstances I also was late in semester one. There’s a pattern here, isn’t there? Never again, ok, I’ve said it publicly, so, no more.
So, I’ve started marking student blogs, where they have to submit 10 entries. The criteria are quite straightforward: have they submitted 10 entries, are they from a range of dates, does the blog indicate regular use, is their an indication of what has been learnt in the entries, and do they indicate a learning progression. This is quite hard for the students to nominate, but it is something that I expect them to be able to do.
Anyway, here are some of the brief blog moments that they’ve self nominated for me.
- Takashi’s sad photo (which became a series).
- Amalia trying to rescue herself
- Kate’s reflections on the difference between blogs and page journals (remember, this is first year) and on google identity, and on the problems of writing a hypertextual essay
- Charlie working out things about identity and voice and then wove an entry (whereas for their first semester of blogging there was no expectation that they would or had to do this) about the blog fad
- Mithila asks a very good question about assessment
- Tara managing to include sex as a heading for her blog which seems relevant to her discussion of endings and begins to think about fictional possibilities, and on the differences between hypertext and linear essays
- Renee on constraint versus freedom (though she wouldn’t call it that) and her development of peer assessment
- Andrew’s neologism describing his experience of the subject (everyone had to do this)
Well, that’s enough for today. The blogs with these students have been surprising. We are using them in a whole of program approach and so the first semester was really to get them comfortable with the idea of writing regularly in a blog environment. No examination or exploration of social software or of blogging beyond basic journal writing. But of their own accord they’ve gone way further than this. I imagine it helped that we also taught very strong fundamentals in HTML code, so they ‘owned’ their blogs. Also they were free to post what they liked, subject to the broad requirements of the University electronic communications policy (which pretty much means no theft, slander, vilification). As the list above indicates (well, what I’ve seen so far), every student seems to have something sensible to write about at some point.
Tags: hypertext
