Reflections from Jill
Jill Walker of Jill/txt gives some great feedback on students teachng with blogs, with links to “how-to’s” by students.
She also list things she did right and things she could have done better.
Here are some things I did right, I reckon, in the blogging section of the course:
- Required different kinds of blog post in the final portfolio: an analysis of a website, a reflective/theoretical post about the web and communication, a technical post (which generated a lot of the teaching posts) and an evaluation of another student’s site.
- Did a fair amount of blogging in class.
- Ditto for comments and linking to each other’s blogs.
Of course there are things I could have done better, too:
- Specified just what, exactly, I expected, much earlier in the semester.
- Done more in-class blogging earlier.
- Worked out a less traumatising way of starting blogging than having each student install MoveableType themselves the first week of semester. I don’t know how I’ll do that next spring. It’s excellent that they have control of their own blogs, and MoveableType has a lot of good features that we’ve used since, but it was a really rough way to start the semester and the many students who had problems certainly didn’t feel very at ease with their blogs. Little confidence was gained.
- Done something about the curriculum - I didn’t use it very well. However, students have found and read and written about a lot of other material themselves, and that’s good. Perhaps more of the curriculum can be self-defined by students next time round
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