Honors English class from De Anza College will be posting in blogs on the De Anza Web page twice a week. The goal is to create a superior medium for discussion of literature over the old online teaching system.  Professor John Lovas said, “The blog allows us to do things we can’t do in threaded discussion.  Students will be required to post at least twice a week. The blog allows us to do things we can”t do in threaded discussion.” The posts students are required to make center around a quotation, either from the readings or from something somebody said during the class discussion. Students are able to read each other’s blogs and make comments in them.

Another interesting project to follow…..

The Creating and Using  Weblogs in ESL/EFL online session that is a part of  the Electonic Village (EV) Online sessions begins tomorrow.  Finishing touches are in place and Joe, Sandy, Aaron and I are ready to begin!  It’s nice to be a part of teaching weblogs over a 6 week period.  Usually I feel lucky to get one session and follow up time is hard to get.  We have kept it simple for beginners but tried to provide good samples, ideas and suggestions. The dialogue is what is important and right now we have 88 participants signed up so it should be a dynamic and informative learning session.  Anyone interested in participating in the dialogue can still sign up. See this post for directions.

On Bernie Dodge’s One-Trick Cyber Pony he speaks of introducing blogging to his class of pre-service English and foreign language teachers. He has a page that links to the student weblogs. Last year he just set them up with blogs and didn’t push it much harder than that. This time he is including some specific directions about blogging. They’re using the Blogger service.  He is letting them use the blog in whatever way they want and to think of it as something that they may use after the course is over.  He is putting a grading component into it by having them blog about the themes of his course:

• teaching in general
• educational technology
• teaching in their content area

Then students will choose five postings that they think best reflect their best thoughtful reflections on these issues plus five postings where they have responded to other class members.  This will count for 15% of their grade.

I like the way he has set this up.  It allows the students a lot of latitude but will get them thinking and responding.  This is another one I’ll be following.

Last summer I posted about Writing to the Moment, the official blog for Dr. Chuck Tryon’s English 1101 course at Georgia Tech.  I have been following along with interest and have really been impressed with the students’ writing. His use of weblogs in the freshman composition classroom was featured in Georgia Tech’s student newspaper, The Technique.  There is so much to spotlight that Dr. Tryon is doing but I’ll give it a go.

You can view student blogs on his links on his blogroll.  It is really interesting to view their thoughts on weblogs and the course.  He also has group weblogs listed.  Some samples:

College Food Blog

Educational Issues

Twisted Celluloid

CAR-LOG

One of Dr. Tryon’s assignments was to read and analyze a blog. One of the blogs was Rachel Lucas’ weblog.  Her response to this assignment was “I’m intrigued by the professor’s assignment. I mean, they’re studying blogs , people! Blogs! Color me delighted.”  Read her entire response – it’s delightful.  She closed with “So. I want to thank Dr. Tryon and his students for teaching me something about myself and my blog. I read all of the posts about myself, and of course you all get A’s from Professor Lucas. Gracias. And if any of you ever decide to jump into the vicious yet endlessly fun shark pool that is the blogosphere, let me know. I’d love to read you.”

Dr. Tryon is front and center with making writing the focus on weblogs.  I look forward to seeing what he does this semester! 

WebTalk Radio Guys Show’s Rob Greenlee predicts the top internet trends for 2004.  He lists the top ten that caught his attention. Here’s what he predicts about professional blogs:

Number 5:
Professional Blogs:  Weblogs in 2004 will go through a transition as the explosive growth in the number of bloggers will slow, but the quality of the active blogs will become much better.  The blog technology and uses will expand in 2004 to include more professional journalists, online experts, major media and corporations. The blog hype in 2003 will settle into a smaller group of bloggers as many personal blogs will go out of date for increasingly longer periods of time as many lose interest in keeping them up to date. This is the way personal webpages declined a few years ago.  

Really simple syndication, better known as RSS, took the Internet by storm in 2003 as many bloggers began using this XML-based standard to share and syndicate written content to RSS News Reader applications. RSS is not really a new Internet protocol as it uses the web to syndicate and share content and links.  Look to 2004 to be the year of RSS as we see it compete directly and improve on the World Wide Web and be a part of the decline in use of the web browser. 

I predict that we will see more and more educational blogs as educators continue to explore possiblilities!