First report on using blogging to teach

Context

I’ve just started a post-grad class.  Most of the students are international and are new to the UK and in 4 months they will write an external exam.  I don’t set it - I just prepare them for it. So it is quite important, IMHO, that they get their writing skills up to scratch.

I obviously don’t want to spend my weekends marking and as I live out of town, I thought a good solution was to get them to blog.  Regular writing up of notes would increase their confidence, raise their fluency, and help them network with each other in a strange city.  And I could give them immediate feedback from 100 miles away.

Login rate

Only one had blogged before.  In the first week, two students of 20 managed to get a public email address, wordpress account, contact me to be included as an author, find out how to blog, and post.   It’s still a complicated business, isn’t it?

3 or so sent me a public email address and I invited them to join from within the blog, but that proved unfruitful.

6 or so had a public email address and joined up to wordpress.  So I was able to add them in as authors during class.

So after one week 1 out of 10 were up and running and 3 out of ten had potential access.  I am quite happy with these figures and will let you know when and if I get to 100%.

Quality of posts

The first student to get in and post is in IT, BTW.  Her post on HRM was perfect.  She wrote one paragraph and summarized the strategic position of her previous company and what it severe discontinuous competition in SaaS in Nigeria meant for recruiting the right staff and maintaining their loyalty.

The second student to get in delighted me by posting a series of experiments on how to post.  This will greatly reassure the more timid who are terrified ‘they will do something wrong’.  He had spoken to me after the first class and indicated that he didn’t really want to go back to his family business of insurance broking.  I had reassured him that he could write about any industry.  He picked video games.  Inevitably the post wasn’t that good substantively but I am still delighted that he picked up the zeitgeist: write on something that interests you and learn from the conversation.

After one week

So after one week, I am beating the 1:9:90 ratio on a small group of international students who arrived in London two weeks ago.  They are jet lagged, tired, befuddled and had barely heard of blogging before they arrived.  Some had never heard of Gmail (though most have at least hear of Facebook or Orkut).

Their writing is good and playful.

Any predictions?

As to when I will get all 22 signed up and writing?  And how many will cross-comment?  And whether they will find each others’ comments useful?

And whether the college will find that the blogging has strengthened the community of students, and enhanced both their performance in other classes and their experience in London?

We need a future’s market here!

August 6, 2008 | Filed Under Jo Jordan 

Comments

2 Responses to “First report on using blogging to teach”

  1. The Godfather on August 8th, 2008 11:49 am

    Good start, Jo.

    I’ll be following this with interest, I know how tricky it can actually be to get students to use technology IF it is not part of their assessment.

    Of course making it part of their assessment may raise many issues?

  2. Jo on August 8th, 2008 1:07 pm

    Thanks. So far, so good. The two blogging are putting up thoughtful posts - very thoughtful posts. They are experimenting too, which I like just as much.

    My undergraduate class, which I hadn’t put onto blogging because it is too big for Wordpress, spontaneously suggested opening a Facebook channel. We’ll see! I might start a wiki for them.

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