Teaching with Blogs
- 2008.02.06
- 7 Comments
Last Friday, Mills Kelly gave a wonderful presentation on his use of weblogs in his history courses in a forum organized by the Center for Teaching Excellence at GMU. If you ever get a chance to listen to Mills talk about teaching, drop whatever you’re doing and go listen. Though they in no way do justice to Mills’s presentation, here are a few notes I took:
- Mills uses blogs instead of course management systems because its something he can set up, modify, and control. He doesn’t have to rely on university tech support, or work through the university. Was dissatisfied with systems like Blackboard and WebCT because the interfaces are clunky, have lots of features he didn’t need/use.
- After switching to blogs, Mills was surprised that students actually wrote more on blogs than on forums in WebCT. Students told him this was because blogging appealed to them more; it was something they may actually use or do outside of class.
- Forums = Socratic model. Blogs = Conversational model. With forums, Mills would ask a question, and students would respond. With blogs, students took more initiative to respond on their own, ask their own questions, approach the topic in their own way.
- Mills uses blogs to get students prepared prior to class, for the work they’ll do in class. So, once class starts he can drop straight into conversation by pointing out posts from students. Breaks the ice, and gets conversation in class going much easier.
- What doesn’t work: 1) Students don’t really take off with blogs as much as he’d like, to make it “their” space to explore and do whatever they want with. Wants more spontaneous participation. 2) Students don’t like to critique other students’ work. They’re reluctant to criticize other students.
- Add a link to your own blog to the course website. Students will read it, because some students are interested in what professors think or are working on. Gives students access to the professor that’s different than in the classroom, and shows them that professors are thinking about topics outside the classroom.
Thanks for a thought provoking entry. I’ve just linked to your entry from my own blog: http://cakeypal.com/blog/
Nice post, Jeremy Boggs, I agree with you on the matter, especially on using “blogs to get students prepared prior to class.” That raises the structural question for the need of a 100 % physical space for learning and teaching. I personally do email my students and guide them to some online references on my webpages, it works fine for me. Cheers !
very nice web site. My English is not so good, so I do not understandt it well, but it seems very good. Thanks
[...] propos Weblogs im Unterricht: Auf clioweb erschien unlängst ein hübscher Bericht über einen Vortrag von Babelblogger Mills Kelly im Center for Teaching Excellence an der George [...]
This is interesting. Did he also use the blog to deliver documents to students, like putting up readings in PDF form? This seems like one of the advantages of Blackboard or the like, but if he found a way around that, I’d be interested to hear about it. On my private blog there’s no way to upload documents, so I had to put them out in the public domain on Scribd, but that’s not workable for a large volume of readings, or for content you want to have available only to the blog users.
@Tona: Mills does put a syllabus for students to download. I’m not sure if he puts readings in PDF format, but the bloggign system he uses (WordPress) does allow you to upload files to your blog. But you’re right about using public services like WordPress.com but serving files only to blog users, or serving lots of readings. I suspect a quick workaround would be to link to the files in a post that’s password-protected, but I’m not sure that’s a long-term solution, or one that’s available to folks using different blogging services.
it looks like a nice site, thanks..