Student blogging notes part two
Two thirds of the way in to the semester, and how are things moving? Well, I’ve learnt that these blogs can become unwieldy, and that different teachers have different ideas of the directions they want to go. The initial idea of posting extra material has proved unsatisfactory. Aside from video links (for example, we showed “The Meatrix” in class when we were working on our food theme, and then posted it for student reference), we have pretty much stopped posting articles, songs with lyrics and so on. I think this is for two reasons. One is practical; items just got swamped and eaten up without response. Despite the tag cloud and the search function, I don`t think students were looking past the first page… partly due to the limited service on their mobile phones (text posts only, with no comment function). Secondly, my feeling is that I didn`t want to feed the learners everything, nor force them to check material we provided. How to encourage without demanding? The age old autonomy problem.
What the blog has become is an arena for collaboration on presentations. Students are required to prepare a presentation for each topic. They do this together in groups of four, then we mix up the groups and they make a solo presentation to members of the other groups.
The students have posted their titles to the blog, then used the comments section to post ideas, links and research for their peers. Some are becoming adept at this, and have begun organising one another. Others are making very limited use. It has been an interesting experiment, but if it is to be used this way it may have been better to use wikis…..
I am interested to find out how the students are collaborating beyond the forums dictated by their teachers. I think it’s likely that they are using their mobile phones to coordinate via text. I am preparing a reflection for the end of term to get a better idea of the learner conception of the project.
My next idea, as the summer approaches, is to open it up. The difficulty has been working with so many students whilst trying to keep the content of the blog on fixed lines tied to the classroom material. To keep the students busy over the summer, I`m thinking of a free-for-all; post one thing a week (video, news story, song, photo…whatever), and comment on two more. I`ll also point them towards things like spore, xtranormal, pixton etc. It`s a limited requirement, but totally free choice regarding content. I can get into the dashboard to tidy up messy links and add tags, but other than that it`s up to them. If it works, we might continue the approach next semester.
