Evaluating Blogs
There’s a really interesting post on Kairosnews from Dennis Jerz. He talks about Guidelines for Evaluating Classroom Blogs.The categories he focuses on in evaluation are coverage, depth, interaction, discussion, xenoblogging and wildcard. He then provides a sample of the guildelines he uses in his “American Lit I” course.
I find his breakdown fascinating. I think it really helps all of us when we share how we’re thinking in terms of evaluating blogs because it is a lot more than just number of posts, etc. In coverage, he is making sure that students have blogged something substantial that shows they have been intellectually involved with the literary works they are studying in class. The depth part requires students to do online research and link to places that helped them formulate their ideas. The interaction brings in interaction with their peers. I like the way he focuses on this. He gives them clear guidelines for agreeing and disagreeing with peers. Really good stuff, here. Then the discussions part hones in on ways to demonstrate that student blogs spark conversations. He said he made up the term xenoblogging and this gives students credit for posting comments in peer blog entries. He even has a quick taxonomy here which you need to definitely check out. The wildcard gives students credit for being creative and taking risks.
Read his entire post. He is doing some impressive work with blogs. Great food for thought! I am going to see if I can apply some of this to a small group of students we will be working with this year at my favorite elementary school.
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