revisionspiral
Community blog or individual blogs?
posted Tuesday, 16 May 2006
Someone who attended my Telecoop presentation on teaching with blogs just asked me whether I recommend a community blog or individual blogs. Here's some of my response to him:
Have others have similar experiences with their students' blogs? I'd like to know.
| As for which is a better method--having them post to one blog or having them keep their own blogs--I think it depends on a few things. The community blog makes it easier for each student to read everything others have said on a particular topic. If you want students to have the option of going back and reading posts to previous weeks' prompts, I recommend that you use a category-assigning system, which blog-city's premium blogs do have. That way, students can select the category (I named each category according to the prompt) in the left gutter and go to only the posts relating to that category. The downside of a community blog is that no one from outside the class every seems to read or post to a community blog. The other disadvantage is that students can't personalize the blog at all in terms of bookmarks and color schemes. Individual blogs are more cumbersome to read because you have to keep clicking to get to other blogs. Students are less likely to read more than a few of their classmates' blogs. BUT, students seem more likely to post non-course related stuff to individual blogs, so the blogs are less "domesticated." Also, people from outside the class seem much more likely to read and post to individual blogs. The downside of individual blogs that I found is that students are more likely to skip blogging (my theory is that they don't feel quite as accountable to their classmates when there's a smaller chance that a classmate will notice that they didn't blog; with the community blog, if someone skips blogging for a week, everyone else notices.) I think the community blog more closely approximates a threaded discussion than the individual blogs do. So those are my thoughts. During the spring semester, I had one class do a community blog and my other classes keep individual blogs and I felt that each class was in some way shaped by the type of blogging they did. I'll probably hedge my bets again in the fall and have one or two classes do a community blog and have the others keep individual blogs. |
Have others have similar experiences with their students' blogs? I'd like to know.
And? (2)
1. Anjy left...
Friday, 19 May 2006 12:09 am
Hey Liz, I think you will be happy to know, I have decided to keep blogging
throughout the summer. I have no idea why, but I think the daily writing
exercise might be good for me.
2. Alice left...
Tuesday, 11 July 2006 11:33 am :: http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs/ganle
This entry describes a combination community class blogspace
("mother-blog") with individual blogs listed in the gutters.
blogarama
