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| Image Credit: Developmental Institute |
All courses are ecologies of learning. There is an
interrelationship between each activity in the course – each activity affects
the other. In order to get the most out of online learning I would suggest that
there are three main pillars that should be a part of most courses – especially
in social sciences and the humanities. These three pillars are: (1) Journaling,
(2) Blogging, and (3) Discussion Boards.
I see each of these online activities as being
interrelated and as contributing to different aspects of learning.
While journaling is an intimate activity between the
teacher and the student, blogging is a public and external activity that allows
the student to become the teacher. If a journal is a private record, and an
interior reflection on, what a student is learning a blog is the public face of
that process of learning.
I have found that, in every class, there are enough
students who produce great content in their blogs – from several different
perspectives – so that I can use their blogs as instruction tools and as “texts”
for all participants in the class to think about. The blogs that students
produce can show all of us new ways of thinking and can deepen our learning.
If digital learning can be criticized for being too
impersonal, it can also be acknowledged for its ability to encourage people to
be producers of unique content. Digital platforms make it possible for all of
us to be publishers and producers of content and ideas. Blogging is an
effective way of exploiting this potential in the (virtual or physical) classroom.
Being in an academic setting, however, teachers must be
able to identify – with reasonable precision – what kind of the learning a
student’s blog represents and how it should be evaluated for credit toward
successful completion of the course.
My rubric for blogging tends to look something like this:
Blogs will be graded based on (1) how well you address
the questions you were asked to write about in this blog; (2) how well you
engage the content (videos, printed or digital texts, etc.) in this course; and
(3) how readable your blog posts are – “readability” includes minimal
typographical and grammatical errors, clear writing, and logical sentence and
paragraph structures.
The work of more advanced students will typically be
evaluated based on how well they engage topics and themes from the course, how
well they engage theoretical perspectives we are using and exploring, how well
they situate course content within theoretical categories, how well they are
able to contrast and compare those theoretical categories; and how well they
are able to critique their selection and use of sources (this may include a
brief annotated bibliography as one of their blog posts).
I have found that it is generally useful to require
approximately 8 blog posts per semester, which generally comes down to one post
every two weeks. Blog posts should average about 700 words.
Because blogs are public expressions of what students are
exploring and thinking about I usually make an eight-entry blog worth 40% of
the final grade in the course; this may include an activity where students give
a presentation of their blog before a live audience.
I think there are three reasons why blogging is
important; first, blogging positions students as active learners rather than as
mere passive consumers of what someone else is telling them. Secondly, a good
measure of how well a person has learned something is whether or not they are
able to teach it to others. The third reason that blogging is important is because
one of the most effective ways to learn is by teaching.
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