Tuesday October 03, 2006

Blogs in teaching!

Hey, y'all, long time no see. Haven't been by Horseless Library for awhile, because I've been busy teaching.

Just wanted to say that I am really loving using the blogs in my two graduate classes. And I'm sure I wouldn't have used blogs if the library hadn't taken the initiative to set them up; a course on Blogger or Typepad seems almost as unprofessional as one on Facebook or MySpace.

I missed Kim Duckett's session on how to use blogs in teaching, so I had to come up with a way myself, but what I'm doing seems to be working well. I post an assignment every week, and the students submit their work as comments weekly or twice-weekly (depending on the class). I grade these on a pass/fail (1 point or 0 points) basis, and that, I think, is important, because the major limitation of the blog as a technology for managing assignments is that there's no way to use it to give the students grades.

I tried to use Vista for my undergraduate class, which can be configured so that the students can see each others' work, and which allows students to track their grades, but frankly I found it to be a nightmare. Everything took SO LONG to set up! There were a million different toggles for creating an assignment, and it wouldn't allow me to copy assignments, and even just the molasses load speed drove me NUTS. I kicked it to the curb and began using a majordomo e-mail list instead so that my undergrads could submit a weekly response that I actually grade (though only on a 0, 1, or 2 point scale).

Even the majordomo list has its problems, but it has two features that I liked: it is  distributed to the whole class, and I can submit grades that go to the students individually. Still, I really really really wish that I had set up a blog with pass/fail weekly assignments for the undergrads, too. They'd be reading each other's work more, I'm certain, which I think is enormously valuable -- they don't usually bother to open the attached essays their classmates send, they've said -- and they'd have that sense of writing in public that writing for the web provides.

One last little cute-ish story about using the blogs that I think Emily Lynema already knows about. We were reading Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," which features a marriage between first cousins.  One student asked about this, and another attempted to answer, but her comment was flagged as porn spam because it contained the word "incest"! She posted her answer on her own blog, and Emily very kindly commented on that post and explained what had happened.

So what I'm trying to say is this: Thanks! Thanks to the Libraries for adopting the blogs, and thanks to all of you (especially Emily) for supporting them so well. I'm convinced they've seriously enhanced my teaching and the students' learning, which I would not say for Vista. (Though I hear that Vista is a blessing for enormous lecture courses.)

My course blogs can be seen here:

• Victorian Love Poetry


• Bibliography and Methodology (Tuesday)


• Bibliography and Methodology (Thursday)