Classroom blogging

I've never been a utopian or even a huge booster when it comes to technology in the classroom. Too often it's never explained why we need blogging in the classroom or why tradition formats of learning and student scholarship are inadequate.

Still, I've decided to set up a group blog for my special topics course in Documentary Fictions next semester. For starters, it's a writing-intensive course, which means significant practice in informal writing as a way to practice and brainstorm for more formal assignments. I saw the weblog format as a useful and equally functional (more functional, in fact) equivalent of printed informal writing.

Moreover, since hybrid forms and questions of documentary authenticity seem to be capturing the attention and imagination of a number of viewers, critics and observers these days, the weblog format should allow for discussion to grow organically over the semester to diagnose what, exactly, makes fake documentary seem so much part of the zeitgeist. It will also give students (and me) a chance to reflect on the array of films we're watching, from staged actuality to the present. I'm looking forward to what could be a really dynamic discussion.

If readers have used weblogs in classroom setting before, I'd be eager to hear your experiences.

Comments

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Anonymous said…
You've probably already seen some of my blog entries and my article about blogging in the composition classroom (there's a link to it in my sidebar). I'm far less utopian about blogging in the classroom than I used to be, especially now that I'm teaching students who may not have computers/modems at home. My best course blog was *probbaly* Rhetoric and Democracy, which I hosted on Blogger simply for practical reasons.

Let us know how it works out.
Anonymous said…
Hi there,
I have been using a class blog in an intro media studies course. It's a blogspot blog (I'll send you the url by e-mail if you like). The assignment is to use the blog as a media consumption diary and to post at least ten times during the semester. The students can get credit for posting a maximum of once per week so that they don't all post ten entries at the end of the term. Everyone says they have liked the experience (this semester was my first time doing this). It helped us get to know one another and got the students in the habits of reflecting on their media experiences and of writing about them. I'm looking forward to doing it again. The class sessions in which I read some of their entries aloud and we discussed them were our liveliest ones.

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