Transparency/ democracy:

My students produce three stages of an essay in a series: rough draft, peer review, revision after teacher edit.
In a writing class about a year and a half ago we’d had a huge debate on what constitutes “improvements” and what is a matter of personal style, and decided together that it would be good to have all three versions accessible for the whole class to think through. That started me off on the idea of students blogging those three versions.

I wound up not using blogs in my one-week writing class this past fall. There was no intrinsic need to “blog” just the first essay. So the students finished their first draft and discussed it face-to-face for peer feedback, using printouts, or they had their Word or GoogleDoc file open and worked on laptops to edit things together. They sent me the first and the second draft and then made a third incorporating my feedback, and I wound up with sets of three files for each student. I was going to help them publish the final draft in a class paper, or blog – I’d announced that on day 1 – but they simply didn’t see the point. So instead we went outdoors, off the grid, together and did improv fluency games. (So much for blowing trumpets, Karenne!) I’d had a notion of engaging them in the concept of blogging beyond assignments, but they simply didn’t buy it.

Classroom management:

In a distance course on job applications (using Moodle), I’ve tried using private buddy forums where students can carry on their pairwork and the teacher, but nobody else, can see their posts. But this is a lot of work for the teacher to monitor, so I’m not too thrilled.
Instead, I have student send each other their Word files and edit them using the “markup” function, and upload them to the platform as asignments, which I mark (feedback and grade). (Perhaps GoogleDocs would be an improvement over Word.) This is is a very tidy arrangement, with the three drafts in orderly compartments along with my feedback and grades, but the documents are completely isolated, the process is invisible, only the buddy you sent your documents to can see your work. It’s easy for everyone to publish the final draft on their Moodle blog for the whole class to see – and this can be decided by the participants on an individual basis. So straight-laced Moodle is really good for this kind of course.

Reflection:

Blogs are a log of a conversation with yourself and others. You’re talking things over with those who find you, or those you invite. Learning blogs could reflect the lovely atmosphere I find students seek and enjoy in face-to-face courses. But I’ve simply found it exceedingly artificial to introduce the concept into existing courses.

So, and this is the fruit of this reflection: It seems to me that I’ll have to offer a course on blogging, rather than using blogging as a tool for other courses.

I think it might work best as a blended learning course, with all of the creative writing exercises going into the blogs. God, I’d love doing that

Thanks so much, Karenne and Darren and Mark, for your comments!

It’s not really a case of making it private – there is an option to delist from search engines in the tumblr dashboard, but other than that it’s just about NOT publicising. Think about how much tweeting and tagging and search engine optimising and commenting and community building a teachers blog has to do to get noticed. If you don’t do any of that, basically you have a private blog ; D

I haven’t kept a blog for writing, though – my previous experience was for an oral communication class, and we kept one as a class to share stuff. I have a writing class this year and I’m considering what technology to use, if any… thirty blogs, all linked to one another, sounds great… but unwieldy. Is it really the best way to achieve the course aims of producing a final research essay? A ning might work too, and I’ve had some success with Jing for feedback. But can’t I just have them work on paper?

This post was mentioned on Twitter by annehodg: New blog post: Question: Why do you write? Why don’t you … http://annehodgson.de/2010/02/07/question-why-do-you-write-why-dont-you-write/…

I too am ambivalent about how my blogging improves my teaching… indeed, in my worst moments I feel it might be a distraction… although like many of us I am trying (and succeeding) in organising and streamlining the ol’ PLN.

As for the student blogging, I agree with you Karenne – it should be private. I don’t lock mine in with passwords as that makes them too tricky to access from mobile phones, but just as there are ways to make your teaching blog very visible online, there are ways of hiding a student blog from search engines and making them all but invisible unless you know exactly where to find them. I’ve been thinking about a ning this year, but to be honest I find them a little bit fiddly to navigate (and also hard to use on a mobile) so I might just use wordpress.

Short bursts are great. I do a lot of creative writing exercises, freewriting or expanding or sorting ideas. One I did just last week that works quite well to practice standard storytelling structures is dictating a phrase and then the students continue individually, and then you dictate another phrase and they continue. I insist on draft cycles, too. Generally I have students show each other their first draft, and get peer feedback on the content first. Then, edited, it goes to me. I make suggestions and underline mistakes, adding a comment sheet with errors to avoid. So students have to self-correct. They revise and then it’s semi-finished, ready for a proper second review by peers, e.g. published in an internal class paper.

I like the muscles analogy. Speaking of which, I have to get over to the gym

Take care! Anne