Thursday, October 19, 2006

What do you think?

As I approach graduation, I've begun to think about the road that lies ahead. Once I get my MSIR degree, my ambition is to someday teach, whether it be as an adjunct at Troy or at a junior college in the area or something. I was thinking about what I would want to require my students to do and I had an idea. Could I make them blog?

My husband is an English professor, and he makes his freshman comp students keep a journal, just to make them write and think about writing. He grades them on whether they do it or not, not on the content. I was wondering if I could do that with a blog.

Would it be okay to create a class blog and require each student to be a weekly contributor? The idea would be that they would have to read, and comment on in a scholarly way, at least one class relevant news article per week. They would then receive a participation grade for doing it. What do the blogging professors out there, or blogging students for that matter, think of the idea? Would it fly or not? Please, tell me what you think.

1 comment:

Steven Taylor said...

I think it would be a great idea. Indeed, there are profs who have done that. The problem would be in inducing participation.

I think that Chris Lawrence at Signifying Nothing has experimented with blogs in the classroom.