Back home. Plus, blogging in the classroom
Ah, jet lag! I came back home last night around 11 after four days on the East Coast for a college friend's wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony, a traditional Latin Catholic Mass, and I was honored to help provide some of the vocals. A bunch of people from our old college Catholic music group were in the ensemble as well so it really felt like old times.
I know that I'm getting to that age when people are starting to get married and even have children, but I still find it strange, even a little unnerving, to see friends I've known since high school and college taking on the trappings of mature life. Time has suddenly seemed to accelerate. In any case, it was a nice break from work, though I did manage to sneak in two chapters of the "Handbook of International Relations" (Risse et al., 2002) while on the plane.
Camicao over at Academic Splat has posted some questions about using blogs as a pedagogical tool. My own experience with course blogs has been somewhat mixed. My general feeling is that the blog should not be grafted on to the course as an additional activity or else students will perceive it as a burden. I tried using the blog as a repository for periodic response papers but few people aside from myself read them because there were so many and they were so long. Artichoke Heart used her blog as a sort of bulletin board to post announcements, syllabi and thoughts about the readings. This is a great arrangement, I think, since it provides a permanent central archive. I'm still trying to figure out how to use blogs as a tool to spark discussion AMONG students, though. This semester I am going to try using a plain old listserv and see if the relative ease with which students can access that makes them use it more frequently.
50 days to "content lock" for my exams!
1 comment:
I once had a class where, in lieu of a final term paper, we responded to each week's readings in Livejournals made specially for the class. The class was on a Wednesday, and we had to have our readings posted by the Monday prior. The class was split into groups of four, and on Tuesdays, we were meant to read the blogs of all of our groupmates and respond to their responses, writing at least one comment per week for each group member.
This, plus a few pop quizzes, was our only coursework, and it was fantastic. Each week our prof would read out a few of the best responses to the class, and they were used to spark in-class discussion (she was kind, though, so that by the end of the course, everyone's blog had been read out in class at least once.) The responses, which were checked and graded week by week, also forced us to actually do each week's reading and to think critically about it.
Add to that the lack of end-of-semester paper stress, and I remain convinced that this is the best way ever devised to run a reasonably small class (we were about 20, I think). I adored it, and I learned more in that course than I did in just about any other.
I did more of the readings, too. ;)
(Love your blog, by the way!)
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