This fall, Katie Holt is using student-generated blogs in her First Year Seminar in Critical Inquiry, Life in a Global City. Katie says this about her aspirations for the assignment:
One of the themes of my FYS is the relationship between individuals and the built environment. I wanted to design a writing assignment where my students would combine images and text to analyze Wooster’s urban spaces. Blogs seemed like an ideal solution for an ongoing writing project that would incorporate a great deal of peer critique and revision.
Janet Russell met with me over the summer to discuss how to best implement the blogs. Janet and Jon Breitenbucher came to my class for two separate visits: one short presentation on what blogs were and how they work, and a second workshop where they guided my students through making their first posts. There were some technical glitches at first - for example, all of my students’ initial critiques were tagged as spam - but these issues were quickly resolved.
Pedagogically, my favorite thing about using the blogs is how they facilitate peer review. Students make very helpful comments about what their peers can do to improve their postings. The comments are all there for everyone to see, and successive reviewers often enter into conversation with other responses to the writing. Everyone in the class participates in this homework assignment.
I’m thinking of using blogs again next semester, but I think it would be more helpful if I made it a part of our weekly activities rather than just concentrating on a single writing assignment.
My class’ final blog postings are due on November 21. Please check them out and see what you think! All comments are welcome.
Spring 2006 semester, Peter Havholm is having his class, The Digital Aesthetic and Literary Experience, use blogs in their pursuit of the question: do the new digital art forms (like interactive fiction and hypertext) require us to think about art in new ways? Students will use blogs to create annotated bibliographies listing both useful resources (linked when possible) and linked internet sites of digital objects that relate to the issues of the course. Peter is interested in how blogs might be successfully employed as a pedagogical research tool. If the plan works, the class will have at its disposal a rapidly increasing collection of digital art which can be used as examples in support of theoretical arguments about the nature of the new media and its creations. Here is the first example, from senior Bryan Whiting:
On [Martha] Nussbaum’s theory that we can derive pleasure from art by using it as an emotional surrogate, I agree that this is a way that we enjoy many types of art. The human mind seems to have a perverse enjoyment of terrifying thoroughly unpleasant situations when there is no chance of harm. . . . I would go further to claim that there is even a pleasure derived from something simply because it would be unacceptable in our real lives. This train of thought reminded me of a flash game which I played years ago but found is still running:
http://members.aon.at/rialskaedda.html/gimproulette.swf
Would I ever want to play Russian roulette? No. It’s stupid, dangerous, pointless, and generally horrifying. But does this simulator interest me? Yes. It does because it’s all in Nussbaum’s ‘potential space’.
The class will also explore a new technology that arose from the Social Software Users Group (SSUG). The software allows people to take notes in (and out of) class using a web browser and have them displayed in near real-time. If you have used the SubEthaEdit program then you have an idea of how this works: many authors creating a document at the same time. Havholm is particularly interested in the effects in- and out-of-class notes will have on the continuing face-to-face discussion. Are there ways to reduce the potential distractions? To incorporate and archive the most interesting and stimulating contributions into a useful continuing record of thinking in the class?
Jon Breitenbucher conducted a training session at the beginning of the second class. The system being used is WordPress MU. It is a multi-user version of WordPress which is in active development. It is very simple to use, but not so simple to set up. Part of this experiment is to collect feedback on WordPres MU so that the system can be improved. Below are some photos from the training.
