Student blogging - (long) notes so far.
I’ve set up a tumblr for my advanced oral communication class; two weeks in, what am I thinking? My main purpose was to share videos and links, something tumblr is well suited for. Our class is themed and we cover about five themes in a fourteen week semester. Last year, I used a lot of newspaper articles and youtube videos in class but a) photocopying / dvd conversion was a pain in the arse and b) giving the students a chance to absorb the material and react to it later was very difficult. I gave out tinyurls, but very few students seemed to be checking up (or if they were, I rarely knew about it. Tumblr gets over these issues by putting everything in one place, tagged and searchable. In addition, I really wanted the students to add their own material. They can do this in two ways; comments or posts. For the first weekend I asked the students to look at the content I had posted (articles, music videos, movie clips), choose one and make a comment. About fifty percent did so, which I am satisfied with. This week the students have formed small groups to prepare their first presentations (on the topic of family). Each group “leader” sent their group’s title to the blog by email, from their mobile phone, at the end of Wednesday’s class. Then this weekend the students have been posting research via the comments section under their group’s title. I’ve been watching them drop in, and watching the nacsent interaction between students. One group member has suggested changing their title, and a small discussion has opened up. For a first year class in their first month of study things are going well. I had far more difficulty getting students to share research last year, perhaps because they were isolated between classes. This gives them both an opportunity and a responsibility. I also note that all the research has been in English - or at least, that which has been posted. Last year, a lot of students were bringing in prinouts of Japanese websites which they then translated to present. We got out of the habit after a bit of pushing. Perhaps somehow the teacher’s presence on the web is keeping them focused… One mistake was to post too much early on. Partly because it got buried and no one saw some of the stuff. And partly because the students need to find more themselves. A case in point - one of the students mentioned the famous 13 year old dad Alfie Patten in class, and my initial thought was to find a link to the story in The Sun and post it up on the blog. I resisted, and sure enough the student has found the exact link herself and posted it this weekend. I am also ambivelent about a few other things. There are eight classes in this programme, shared between four teachers. I had initially been encouraging other teachers to promote the blog amongst their classes, but in retrospect it might have been better to separate them. I had hoped that cross-class collaboration would occur, but the volume of material generated by 160+ students might get out of hand. I am still thinking, too, about how to encourage the students to use the blog without making it obligatory. So far, it’s not a major issue. Most of them can at least view the main posts with thier mobile phone browsers, and make their own, although I have discovered that we can neither make nor view comments with a mobile. Considering the importance of mobile technology in Jpan in particular, this is a little disappointing. But so far, I’m very happy ; )
